(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
Ugly subject, fascinating interview. The NYTime‘s Clyde Haberman takes ‘an expert on terrorism trials’ to lunch:
Perhaps a meal was not the ideal setting to talk about something as unappetizing as a hunger strike. But there was no way, even with lunch on the table, to avoid that grim topic with Karen J. Greenberg, who has made herself an expert on matters of torture, terrorism trials and the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba…
“It’s not surprising that this has happened, not surprising at all,” Ms. Greenberg said at Morandi, an Italian restaurant on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village, not far from her apartment. “What is startling is how it has taken the detainees to bring to a crisis what so many of their lawyers and well-meaning human rights activists have tried to do for 12 years. They’re in control of this issue. They certainly are, because the only power they have is threatening to die.”
“They can’t tolerate it anymore,” she said. “It is despair, in our faces. Sure, there are people who would say: ‘They’re bad people. They deserve it.’ But that is not how we as Americans think about our punitive systems.” …
Ms. Greenberg has thought a great deal about those systems in the dozen years since she reinvented herself in the academic world by founding a center at New York University to examine matters of law and security. A couple of years ago, she took her expertise to Fordham University’s law school, where she is director of its Center on National Security…
Ms. Greenberg (who is not a lawyer) sides with President Obama and others who believe that by holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantánamo, this country has, as she put it, “turned its legal premises upside down.” To be practical about it, she notes that 509 terror-related cases have been settled in federal courts since Sept. 11, 2001, with a conviction rate of 89 percent, while military commissions have produced a mere seven convictions.
“Yes, I understand that self-defense is an extremely important issue,” she said. “But self-defense with a measure of wisdom would be a lot better than self-defense that screams fear and a lack of confidence in your ability to keep yourself safe.”
Her vexation extends to fearful politicians, the ones who recoiled at the Obama administration’s original plan to hold a trial in Lower Manhattan — in the shadow of the vanished towers, as it were — for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. They ignored how New York has had many terrorism trials, sometimes several at once. Throughout, the city barely blinked.
“We can take in an awful lot,” Ms. Greenberg said. “New Yorkers are tough. They’re savvy. And so are New York juries.” …
This would be the Karen Greenberg who wrote in the Guardian, two weeks ago:
… The administration’s one-person-at-a-time approach to closing Guantanamo has proved fruitless. Bold gestures are needed — for starters, the cleared detainees should be sent to their home countries, even to Yemen. Additionally, paying restitution to detainees and helping them reintegrate into their home countries or new locations would go a long way toward eliminating the stain of Guantanamo.
Time is of the essence. Of the 100 hunger-striking detainees, four are hospitalized, and 23 are being force-fed. The best option is to release the inmates who can’t be tried, end the policy of detention outside the laws of war and restore the sense of moral dignity that has withered with every day of Guantanamo’s existence. As Obama said this past week, “It needs to stop.”
? Martin
Yeah, but Congress are a bunch of fucking cowards.
Roger Moore
@? Martin:
And so are a lot of the people who elect them. We can’t palm the responsibility off on anyone else. Those prisoners are still there because the American people are afraid of doing anything with them.
Villago Delenda Est
The scum of the GOP cannot be moved by the deaths of mud people mooslims.
Frankensteinbeck
I have no idea what is up with congress’s damn-near-unanimous insistence on keeping Guantanamo open. Hell, they retroactively made Bush’s torture legal and the testimony gained from it applicably in court. I can’t think of anything except the War on Terror that congress absolutely agrees on. Even support for Israel is more divided.
Amir Khalid
Karen Greenberg is obviously right. These men who have been held all these years without the prospect of a trial deserve to be sent wherever someone will take them — back home, to a third country, or to resettlement in the US like the witness protection system if no one else will take them. They also deserve generous compensation for the years they’ll never get back.
But as to their chances of getting all that, I’m afraid I agree with Martin on the poor odds and the reasons for the odds. Your Congress is dominated by people who pander to spite and cowardice and nihilistic partisanship. They know what needs to be done with Camp X-Ray, they know America would benefit from minimising further damage from its existence; they just don’t care to do it.
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
If they close the prison, let these people be tried legally, and so much as a single one of them is ever arrested for so much as jaywalking, the congresspersons who allowed it will be lambasted in the media for the rest of time as having blood on their hands. Ergo, they’re too scared to act. As near as I can tell, that’s what it is.
burnspbesq
@Chris:
Not to mention the likelihood that at least some of them will be acquitted because the evidence sucks.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Usually, that’s what I’d blame, too. But the cowardice that keeps Guantanamo open has overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses of Congress, so I think it represents something that’s more fundamental. It seems pretty clear to me that keeping Guantanamo open is genuinely popular and reflects that a large fraction of the populace is still to afraid to do what needs to be done.
Corner Stone
@Chris: There can be no trials. These people have to be set free, either with a visa in the US, or transported to wherever will take them and they want to go.
Litlebritdifrnt
Skeeter arrives in about 30 mins, who knows what is going to happen?
mclaren
What delusional fantasy version of America is this person living in?
WTF???!?!?
That is exactly how Americans think about their punitive systems. Americans make jokes about prison rape. (See “TMZ Thinks the Epidemic of Prison Rape Is Hilarious,” The Awl, 11 January 2010) Americans set up prisons to deliberately degrade and brutalize prisoners, as in the
23-hour-a-day solitary confinement in the Supermax prisons, or the massively overcrowded state prisons that guarantee savage gang violence.
The entire point of American prisons is to torture inmates, preferably to death, and it’s been that way ever since the 1970s, when rehabilitation and education programs were slashed.
You only need to read headlines like MAN’S AIDS-RELATED DEATH AFTER PRISON RAPE HIGHLIGHTS NATIONAL CRISIS to see that America is a sick twisted society of cowardly sadists who dote on brutalizing the helpless and glory in watching defenseless victims get savaged and tortured and raped.
Cowards and Quislings and bully-worshipers like General Crackpot Fake-Name and Mnemosyne and burnspbesq and omnis omnes, who cheer these kinds of atrocities until their throats are raw and invent ever more outlandish verbal calisthenics to defend this kind of indefensible barbarity, are the ones who be in pound-me-in-the-ass prison. I’ve been hammering away literally for years about the documented fact that well over 70% of the victims (many children when arrested) imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay are not just innocent, but long known and proven to be innocent — in most cases, they’re innocent bystanders who got sold by corrupt Afghan warlords to the U.S. forces to reap a bounty on “terrorists.” Instant lottery winner: corrupt Afghan warlord lies that “this 15-year-old kid is a dangerous Al Qaeda terrorist!” and the U.S. military command in Afghanistan pays him $50,000 in cash and then the 15-year-old kis gets shipped off to Gitmo to be tortured into babbling lunacy even though he’s an innocent donkey-herder who never did a damn thing wrong.
True to form, the sociopaths and bully-worshipers (Mneomsyne, burnspbesq, General Crackpot Fake Name, eemom) infesting this forum laughed at my assertions and ridiculed everything I said even though articles like Former State Department Official: Team Bush Knew Many at Gitmo Were Innocent, The Atlantic, 26 April 2013, and Bush knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent, former Colin Powell aide tells court, Daily Mail Online, 9 April 2010 backed up my claims with hard facts.
To the denizens of Shithole America, facts mean nothing: only torture matters. To the population of human cockroaches misnamed Americans, logic is unimportant — all that counts is whether verbal and legal gymnastics can be pretzel-twisted into justifying tormenting innocent victims. Shithole America, a nation founded on the genocide of the native American indian, is only comfortable as long as it can rape and torture and kill defenseless victims.
Cardinal Roger Mahoney wrote: “Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members — the last, the least, the littlest.”
On that basis Shithole America stands condemned as a depraved culture.
gene108
@Villago Delenda Est:
For many on the Right, the GITMO detainees starving themselves to death would solve the whole issue of what to do with them; in effect the detainees would be doing us a favor.
cathyx
At the very least, why can’t they be put in the witness protection program? They will be monitored and able to live a free-ish life. Even letting them bring their families here.
Yatsuno
@mclaren: And after all that…you still live here. Telling.
mclaren
@gene108:
Read the goddamn article. The inmates at Guantanamo Bay can’t starve themselves to death. They’re being force-fed using extremely painful hoses jammed into their noses and rammed down their throats into their stomachs.
They’re being tortured, as usual. This is the response of America to any crisis involving prisoner mistreatment: torture ’em even more.
PIGL
@mclaren: With the exception of the some of the callouts, which I think you may be overstating, I have to say that I agree with you. The pants-shitting terror that required 15yr olds to be in manacles on their desert island prison, lest they go all Arnie on your ass, the eager embrace of torture at the very first chance that offered, and of course your system of internal crime and punishment, and the all-but-open Friekorps-isation of the police: this is exactly what America is about.
I would not say that America is the worst in the world in these respects, but you are definitively in the middle of pack that includes some pretty sorry company. It would be a good start if you were to stop kidding yourselves.
e.a.f.
Karen Greenburg’s comments are true. Gitmo needs to close. It does nothing to bring security to America. Gitmo violates the basic principles America was founded on. Gitmo was simply a way to get around the constituion. That was not why it was written.
People have been in Gitmo for so long they are more willing to die than stay alive there. That does not speak well of the American justice system. It makes the Americans look no better than some 3rd world dictatorship. We do not even know if some of the people in Gitmo are guilty of anything they could be charged with or sent to jail for. Some of them may have only been exercising their right to free speech. Either get these people a trial in an american court with in 30 days or send them all home. If their country doesn’t want them, who cares. Simply release them, give them tickets and money to return to where ever they call home or go some where else. Compensation for the detention might be appropriate also. Certainly the Cuban government would permit the detainess entrance to there country to get to the airport.
By being willing to starve themselves to death the prisoners at Gitmo do control the situation. Force feeding people is barbaric. Between the torture of prisoners, the detaining of people who are neither charged nor tried just clearly announced the U.S.A. has given up the right to call itself the home of the free and brave. The torture of prisoners and detaining people who aren’t charged isn’t a brave thing to do. It is the cowards way to deal with a situation. It certainly isn’t brave either. People who torture are cowards. They know they have no other way to deal with things besides illegally creating pain in another human being. Torture is torture. What the American politicians and military have done and are still doing is no different from what went on in Chile and Argentine. We know how well that turned out for those countries.
At some point the U.S.A. will have to account for these crimes.
Close Gitmo and save the money to bring down the deficiet or improve services to American veterans.
SatanicPanic
@mclaren: The first 1/4 of your comment I agreed with. But my attention span is too short to read the whole thing. I blame the internet and kids today. Or your writing.
cathyx
@e.a.f.:
We could also say the same thing about drone attacks. Except change ‘charged with and sent to jail for’ for killed by a drone strike.
Jack Hughes
As with every other problem this country faces, the Guantanamo issue was needlessly exacerbated by the cowardice of congressional Democrats who ran for the hills — deserting the president — at the first sign of the Republicans’ manufactured controversy.
Someday the Democrats will have to start acting like a national political party or voters will find a party that will.
lol
@Jack Hughes:
Exacerbated by cowardly congressional Democrats who were promptly rewarded by a supposedly knowledgeable elite that continues to blame Obama.
MattR
It is never a good situation when “At least let them die” is an argument worthy of serious consideration.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
From what I understand most of them would/could not be convicted in a court of law because of the lack of evidence and that’s why most of them have been scheduled to be released already. That’s maybe a reason that so many congress critters are against anything other than keeping them there. It would point out how fucking morally corrupt they are. Of course doing what they are doing now does the same thing.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
If congress only did what was popular we would have gun control far stronger than what the nra is afraid of. Congress doesn’t worry about what is popular, they worry about getting re-elected or moving up in political circles and what will they do after that doesn’t work. Popular? Pffft. Most of them are weak chickenshits who do whatever pays the best. Our interests? Not unless it aligns with theirs.