A couple of days ago, Eric Umansky wrote that “a month ago, I was speaking with Karen Green at NYU’s Center on Law and Security, who [said] something about Gitmo that’s stuck with me ever since: Time and again prisoners at Gitmo have insisted that they are innocent and asked the tribunals there to simply follow-up and try to corroborate their alibis. But the tribunals almost never do that.”
He brought the issue up in connection with an Associated Press story about a guy, Saddiq Turkistani, who had been imprisoned and tortured by the Taliban for five years because they suspected him of being an Israeli agent intent on killing bin Laden and then, when the Taliban were overthrown, was shipped off by the U.S. from the Afghanistan prison where he’d been held by the Taliban to Guantanamo Bay, where he’s been held for six years on suspicion of having been an al Qaeda agent.
One of Umansky’s readers suggested the reason was that releasing someone from Guantanamo laid the captors open to blowback should the someone prove later to have been a terrorist or, perhaps more likely, should they turn into one as a result of their ordeal. It’s easier and safer, and probably less personally frightening, not to make waves—to avoid altogether any genuine research into guilt or innocence.
Which brings us to Avedon Carol, one of whose own readers remarked that the key distinction “between you and the guy you are torturing is that he might be innocent, but you are not.” The best you can hope for, by way of mitigation, if you’re in the torture business is that you’re both guilty.
The AP story notes that Turkistani is only one among at least a double handful of Guantanamo prisoners who went straight from the tender mercies of a Taliban prison to Guantanamo. But at least we know, thanks to Michael Moore and SiCKO, that unlike in the Taliban’s prisons, world-class health care was available to treat the physical indignities they suffered at our hands in Guantanamo.
Mental health is another matter, since we know that U.S. psychologists and psychiatrists are complicit in devising the regimens aimed at breaking detainees’ minds, and while there’s some value in keeping a prisoner healthy enough to live through physical mistreatment, there’s none in keeping him resilient of mind enough to resist it. If a prisoner isn’t defeated enough by the simple fact of being labeled an ally of the people who imprisoned and tortured him before we came along, our mental health professionals are standing by to finish the job, a luxury the Taliban probably lacked.
Those are not people to whom one could safely commend one’s woes, or fate, or life; they may not know, and it may not really matter to them, who’s guilty and who isn’t, but their victims know for sure, and it does matter to them and to most of the rest of the world.
