Selling Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America's Most Notorious Military Prison

1. Framing the Decision

11 1 Framing the Decision The world first learned that some of the Afghan and foreign nationals taken prisoner in Afghanistan were being transported to the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in news reports of their arrival on January 11, 2002. Although well covered by the press, the decision to use the military base as a prison initially encountered more interest than opposition in the United States. Previous administrations had used the base as a location to detain refugees from Haiti and Cuba. Ongoing combat operations in Afghanistan and pervasive anxiety about new terrorist attacks within the United States meant that the decision was initially understood as little more than a stopgap, a reasonable response to the exigencies of wartime. Prompted by both the press and politicians, public opinion viewed the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as comparable to the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.1 In his address to the nation on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush referenced Pearl Harbor directly with the phrase “one Sunday in 1941,” and Jon Bridgman developed the parallel in a December 2001 newspaper article, “Lessons Learned from Two Days of Infamy.”2 National security crises of such magnitude are typically thought to require immediate and decisive action.3 Captured enemies must be held in custody somewhere, and the number taken captive in Afghanistan was expected to be large. Airlifting prisoners captured on battlefields and at roadblocks in South Asia halfway around the planet to a prison camp in the Caribbean might seem excessive, but Washington knew that the American public was inured to immense waste and secrecy in everything involving national security. After the terrifying 12 | The Official Explanation events of September 11, 2001, with the images of passenger airliners smashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center replayed again and again on television news, few Americans would balk at the high price tag. Only four months after the most traumatic public event in their lives, most Americans were persuaded that they wanted security and they wanted it now. The first indication that the Guantánamo decision involved something more than a ready-made location for a military prison camp emerged during a lengthy January 22, 2002, news briefing by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.4 A former Nixon and Ford administration political appointee given to military bureaucratic doublespeak delivered while executing inscrutable chopping motions with his hands and arms, Rumsfeld offered three rationales for the Guantánamo decision : threat, intelligence, and prosecution. Holding the captured at Guantánamo was necessary, Rumsfeld explained , to prevent them from being released to commit further terrorism . Using the sort of language that American politicians use when promising to “get tough” on violent crime, he painted a picture of the prisoners as veritable terrorist supermen.5 The principal problem with the threat rationale is that the hundreds of prisoners transferred to Guantánamo were no more dangerous than the tens of thousands of other prisoners then being held in prison camps in Afghanistan. The most dangerous of the lot were no more capable of violent acts than any other captured soldier in a Third World army. Nor were there any important figures in al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Most of the senior alQaeda and Taliban figures at the start of the war escaped capture by slipping across the border into northern Pakistan. The most promising middle-rank al-Qaeda figures taken captive were being held by the CIA in “black sites,” an archipelago of secret prisons from Poland to Thailand, rather than by the United States military. The agency would do its part to provide a post hoc justification for the Guantánamo decision by transferring a handful of its more valuable prisoners to the naval base, but that was years in the future. Although the invasion of Afghanistan managed to topple the Taliban from power, it largely failed in its other political and military objectives. The overwhelming majority of Guantánamo prisoners would be repatriated and released, Framing the Decision | 13 while most of those who remained at the base would be there because there was, effectively, no place to send them. Rumsfeld’s second and “most important” rationale for the Guantánamo decision was to collect intelligence that might be used to prevent terrorist attacks in the future. The secretary of defense and his fellow neoconservatives in the Bush administration were still...