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Chapter 11. Guantanamo: America's Foreign Supermax in the Fight Against Terrorism.
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Chapter 11 Guantánamo America’s Foreign Supermax in the Fight Against Terrorism Jeffrey Ian Ross and Dawn L. Rothe Much of what we know about the conditions at Guantánamo and the treatment of the detainees has been obtained through visits by US politicians, monitoring by representatives from international nongovernmental and human rights organizations, reports from individuals who have been released, statements by lawyers defending those who have been detained, books written by individuals who worked at this facility, and information from reporters.1 Not only the decision to detain enemy combatants but also the conditions to which they have been subjected have been vigorously debated. Many of the conditions of the detention facilities and processes at Guantánamo can also be found in a traditional American supermax prisons, where detainees are confined to their cells twenty-three out of twenty-four hours a day, movement inside the facility is very limited, if not highly controlled , access to visitors is either nonexistent or severely curtailed, and access to typical amenities is sharply curtailed (Ross 2007b). In fact, two of the camps were modeled on American supermax prisons. Moreover, supermax prisons typically house convicted gang leaders and political criminals such as spies and terrorists, and the enemy combatants at Guantánamo are suspected of committing and/or aiding in the commission of terrorism. To demonstrate the similarities, we begin by providing a brief history of Guantánamo. We then explain why the United States’s choice to use Guantánamo provided the opportunity for state crime and how the classification of detainees as enemy combatants and the use of torture circumvent existing treaties to which the United States is a signatory. Finally, we provide an analysis of the US government’s policies and sanctioned behaviors toward the detainees. 145 Historical Importance of Guantánamo At the far southeastern end of Cuba is a naval base owned and operated by the US government, in particular the Department of Defense. This installation , which sits on Guantánamo Bay, consists of a number of detention camps and is now generally referred to as Guantánamo or “Gitmo.” In 1903, based on the Platt Amendment (i.e., a treaty between Cuba and the United States), the American government obtained what it claimed was a perpetual lease on the forty-five square miles that compose the base. Although Fidel Castro’s communist regime (1959–present) accepted (at least one) payment from the Americans, the Cuban government has virulently opposed the Americans’ presence. The Guantánamo base has historically been used as a listening post and as a hub for American military and naval activities in the Caribbean. In the 1990s, Guantánamo also housed fleeing Cuban and Haitian refugees. In 1993, largely through the work of the New York City–based Center for Constitutional Rights, US Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. (Eastern District) declared the camp unconstitutional, and the refugees were subsequently relocated. Shortly after terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, and before the Americans started bombing operations in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, in what was called Operation Enduring Freedom, the US government formulated plans to detain captured members of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Though officials considered housing those captured on prison ships, at the military facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in the Pacific islands, on the island of Diego Garcia, and on the infamous Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, the Bush administration ultimately determined that Guantánamo would serve as the ideal destination for these prisoners. The Geo-strategic Choice of Guantánamo to House the Detainees Over the past decade, Guantánamo, strategically located in a legal “black hole” of US-leased land in Cuba, became home to as many as seven hundred detainees from more than forty countries, all of whom were claimed to be members or supporters of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime or of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In a radio interview on January 6, 2002, Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution (a well-known liberal think tank in Washington, D.C.), explained the underlying ideology behind choosing Guantánamo: We can sort of do what we want to there. It’s on foreign soil, and yet the foreign government doesn’t have much say in how we use the place. . . . It’s close enough to the United States [that] you can imagine flying in J e f f...