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

4. Extraordinary Threat

62 4 Extraordinary Threat The “worst elements of al-Qaeda and the Taliban” was how Brigadier General Michael Lehnert, the U.S. Marines officer in command of the prison, described the prisoners as they began to arrive at the base.1 Not to be outdone by a subordinate posturing for the press, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Richard Myers promoted them as terrorist supermen during a joint press briefing with Secretary Rumsfeld on January 11, 2002. “These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down . . . these are very, very dangerous people.”2 By the end of the press briefing, Myers and Rumsfeld were backtracking on that absurd claim, but it nonetheless revealed something important about the thinking current at the highest levels of the Pentagon. The press and public were to be presented with the image of an irrational enemy extraordinarily dangerous even in captivity. Behind the scenes there were less histrionics. During a White House meeting a week later on the legal status of the captives, Myers argued that failing to treat the captured as if they were prisoners of war might result in the mistreatment of captured American military personnel.3 This argument for the primitive calculus of mutual deterrence that long predated the development of international humanitarian law was successful, if only in part. Others at the meeting wanted all of the captives to be treated like international outlaws. The result was a compromise. Prisoners identified as members of al-Qaeda would be deemed “unlawful combatants.” Prisoners identified as members of the Taliban would not be formally designated as prisoners of war Extraordinary Threat | 63 under the Geneva Conventions but would still be accorded some of the rights associated with that status. Three observations should be made about this exchange. First, the timing of the debate about their legal status—a week after they had already begun arriving at Guantánamo—indicates ad hoc decision making . Important determinations were being made on the fly. Second, the assumption that the Taliban would reciprocate the treatment of the captured suggests that they were not seen as irrational fanatics with whom one could never expect to negotiate. People so ferocious that they would attempt to bring down aircraft by gnawing through hydraulic lines are hardly capable of reciprocity. Third, the decision makers were determined to select at least some from among the prisoners for harsher treatment. The urge to punish was close to the surface of their thinking. For public consumption, however, the prisoners were still being cast in the role of extraordinarily dangerous enemy. Rumsfeld described them as “extremely dangerous” and justified their transfer to Guant ánamo as necessary to prevent their release “back out on the street to engage in further terrorist attacks” during a January 22, 2002, press conference at the Pentagon.4 His choice of words is revealing. When prisoners in police custody are ordered released by the courts because criminal charges against them have been dismissed for lack of evidence, procedural irregularity, acquittal, or parole, American politicians who want to posture as tough on crime describe them as having been released “back out on the streets.” Although most of the prisoners arriving in Guantánamo were captured in rural Afghanistan, a world away from urban America, Rumsfeld employed the phraseology of aggressive crime fighters contemptuous of the civil rights of the accused. “Back on the streets” is code for a punitive approach to crime. Implied in the phrase is the idea that the guilty have escaped proper punishment because of excessive concern for their legal rights. Perhaps Rumsfeld subconsciously associated the Guantánamo prisoners with street criminals in custody because they were presented to the television and print press elaborately shackled and dressed in prison-orange jumpsuits. More probably, he or his advisors selected those words to evoke the threatening image of the African American or 64 | The Official Explanation Hispanic violent criminal that has haunted the psyches of white middle -class Americans at least since the 1960s. Using the singular “street” rather than “streets” also succeeded in connecting the familiar domestic threat with that of “the Arab street,” a reference to public opinion in the Arab world. Two generations of conservative American intellectuals have instructed one another in what Arabs think or might think in language scarcely different from that used by British and French colonial officials in the 1920s...