October 14, 2018
Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, How Guantanamo Set the Stage for the Kavanaugh Hearings[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Just a reminder that, for $100 ($125 if you live outside the U.S.), you can still get a signed, personalized copy of Juan Cole’s important new book, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by visiting our donation page. Check out Cole’s recent TomDispatch piece on the Republicans and Islamophobia or the one he put up at his own invaluable website, Informed Comment, related to his book. The offer will only last three more days! Tom]
You want the nitty-gritty on the Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the U.S. created at the CIA’s global black sites and its detention center in Guantánamo, Cuba? Well, here’s a true story about an American National Guardsman at Gitmo who was only pretending to be a recalcitrant prisoner being “extracted” from a cell for training purposes and was beaten almost senseless. As I wrote long ago, this “happened to 35 year-old ‘model soldier’ Sean Baker, who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to Guantánamo and he volunteered to be just such a ‘prisoner,’ donning the requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his ‘extraction’ and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular epileptic-style seizures ten to twelve times a day. (And remember the Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing that he wasn't a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing the job.)” So just imagine what was done to actual detainees there and in those black sites.
TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantánamo’s First 100 Days, has written about that grim prison and American torture techniques there and elsewhere for TomDispatch since 2005. Recently, she’s begun tracking the ways in which the Guantánamo mentality has left that island and headed for the mainland. However unattended, this is a development that should have been expected and is ominous. Of course, any country that creates a system of injustice offshore of its system of justice should expect the former to infect the latter sooner or later. Greenberg recently followed that Gitmo mentality to the U.S.-Mexico border where undocumented immigrant children were turned into a set of junior “detainees” and given a dose of offshore treatment. Today, she follows it into the heart of Washington and the Kavanaugh hearings. However, in a country that elected a president who put his stamp of approval on the idea of torturing prisoners (“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding...”) and possibly slaughtering their relatives (“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families...”), no one should be surprised to find aspects of the Guantánamo mentality taking a bow, as Greenberg suggests today, in the nation’s capital during the recent Kavanaugh imbroglio. Tom Justice Derailed
Brett Kavanaugh and the Echoes of Gitmo
By Karen J. Greenberg Amid the emotional hubbub over the predictable confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, there has been a largely overlooked casualty: the American judiciary. It’s not the end result alone -- his addition to the highest bench in the land where he will sit for life -- that promises to damage the country, but the unprofessional, procedurally irresponsible way his circus-like hearings were held that dealt a blow to the possibilities for justice in America, a blow from which it may prove hard to recover. Senator Susan Collins acknowledged the damage the hearings wrought, even if she misunderstood the cause. Delivering her massively disappointing decision to vote yes on Kavanaugh, Collins reflected on what she saw as the passion that overrode the presumption of innocence and expressed “worry” that such behavior would lead to “a lack of public faith in the judiciary.” Though wrong in blaming the Democrats for those passions, her conclusion was otherwise spot on. This confirmation has underscored and enhanced the fragility of justice in America, at least as a reflection of law, decency, honesty, transparency, and fairness. Surprising as this derailment of justice might have seemed, it echoed (and may, in fact, have reflected) another long-unspooling twenty-first-century American degradation of justice. The proceedings created to try those terrorism suspects locked away in the offshore detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, pivoted away from many of the country’s legal and moral principles (a subject to which I’ll return). Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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