12 June 2006

Political Theater

Three prisoners staged an act of political theater at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

No, wait a minute. I am using the wrong words. Three Detainees were driven mad by abuse and were forced to take their own lives by the inhuman and illegal prison managed by the U.S. government on sovereign Cuban soil.

No, wait, it's early. Let's try it again: three enemy combatants conducted an elaborately staged attack on the detention facility at Camp X-Ray, Cuba. Not having belt-bombs, and unable to take score of innocents with them, the detainees sought martyrdom with the only weapon they had available: their bed linen, twisted into nooses and used to hang themselves.

There. That feels better.

I like Guantanamo. and used to pass through the “crossroads of the Caribbean” a lot. There was nothing ominous about the place, and the word did not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

It was a cheerful backwater in the Cold War, a way to tweak the nose of Uncle Fidel, and we used it as a Fleet Training Area mostly as a bizarre form of political theater. Fidel would turn off the water, we would bring in desalinization barges. Refugees would navigate the minefields around the base to seek asylum. The Cubans would put in more mines and guard towers, as though the marines were going to storm out the gate and overthrow the Revolution.

There was real tension, of course, and a lot of high and low comedy. Sometimes a Navy ship would mistake the entrance to another bay for that of the Base, realizing its error only at the last minute. The base is split in two by the channel that leads up the bay and into Cuba proper. It is open to navigation, so there was nothing unusual about crossing in a small boat in the wake fo a Soviet freighter.

Things changed in the mid-nineties. The base was just about to dry up and blow away. We were only keeping it as an irritant to Castro. Sending ships down there to train was expensive, and being a theatrical device, activities began to shut down.

Then a wave of Cubans began to sail across the straits to Florida, and an even larger tide of Haitians set their sights on the Sunshine State. The obsolete base suddenly seemed awfully convenient as a detention center, offshore and almost completely invisible.

I was in the camps there that held thousands of Haitians. The Cubans had more political drag, and were kept in separate and more comfortable camps. Different rules for them.

I was in a helicopter on a Congressional tour with the Base Commander in 1995. He stood in the open door of the UH-1 and gestured toward his fiefdom, showing us the location of the current transitory camps, and the site surveys for the ones that were to come. One of the sites was called “X-Ray,” and that is where the latest act of political theater occurred.

The detainees, or martyrs, or actors, were named Mani bin Shaman bin Turki al-Habardi, and Yasser Talal Abdulah Yahya al-Zahrani, and Ali Abdullah Ahmed. By nationality, they were two Saudis and one Yemeni, a microcosm of the commando groups that seized the airliners on 9/11.

The Authorities say the suicides were coordinated, and even say that it constitutes an act of war. That is a little over the top by my reckoning, but it certainly was an effective operation that involved the ultimate sacrifice.

It required some detailed planning. The men were not in adjacent cells, but the walls were chain-link, and they could have talked to one another. Laundry was hung in ways to obscure the view of the cells.

Standard procedure at X-Ray are that guards are to observe prisoners every two minutes, and that has prevented over forty suicide attempts since the camp was established.

When the high-ranking Nazis were under watch at the Spandau prison in Berlin, a soldier was assigned to man a peep-hole to watch them round the clock. Even then, Herman Goering managed to take a poison pill and cheat the hangman. Without inhuman and intrusive handling, humans can get into all manner of mischief.

I don't know if any of them were Sufis, adherents of the mystical wing of Islam, but the Times this morning is saying someone had a vision that Camp X-Ray would not be closed until three prisoners died. There is a case advancing toward the Supreme Court on the constitutional issue of military tribunals for war criminals. The resolution of that case will have a bearing on whether the camp stays open, and that may have influenced the timing of the operation.

The Administration knows the place is a political liability, and the prisoners know that, too.

The martyrs left notes. Gitmo management says the contents of have been translated but are not going to release them. The contents are doubtless inflammatory, and calculated to intensify the impact.

The usual advocates for the detainees piped up in time to make the Monday press cycle, sternly chiding the authorities for maintaining conditions that were clearly making the inmates insane.

I don't know about that, but something clearly is going on there. Last month two prisoners attempted suicide; another one was staged to lure guards into a near riot. There have been hunger strikes, just like the ones the IRA staged in the jails at Long Kesh.

As theater, the operation has to be judged as a success. It is more bad publicity for Gitmo, more bad press on the back-end of the al Zarqawi killing, more ammunition for the advocates of the enemy combatants.

The men that killed themselves would have killed a lot more people, if they could have. But they didn't have the tools, which is a good thing.

The ironic part is that one of the three was supposed to be released. He had not been told because the authorities could not decide what country to send him back to. I wonder if the prospect of liberty would have changed his mind?

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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