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By: Lauren,
on 4/27/2011
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By Karen Greenberg
The most amazing fact about the more than 700 previously unseen classified Guantánamo documents released by WikiLeaks and several unaffiliated news organizations the night of Sunday, April 24, is how little in them is new. The information in these documents — admittedly not classified “top secret” but merely “secret” — spells out details that buttress what we already knew, which is this: From day one at Guantánamo, the U.S. national security apparatus has known very little about the detainees in custody. The United States does not know who they are, how to assess what they say, and what threat they ultimately pose.
Given this vacuum of ignorance, U.S. officials decided at the outset that it was better to be safe than sorry. Therefore, any imaginable way in which behavior or statements could be deemed dangerous led to individual detainees being classified as “high risk.” The result was the policy we have seen since 2002 — a policy of assessing potential danger based on details like what kind of watches the detainees wore, the way they drew on the dirt floors of their cages, and whether they had travel documents on them. In addition, the just-released documents reaffirm the fact that much of the material on the detainees apparently came from hearsay derived from what seems to have been a limited number of interrogations, some performed under circumstances amounting to torture.
It is not just the conclusions of Guantánamo critics like myself that are being verified by these newly found documents. The conclusions of the judges who have sifted through available information to determine just who deserves to be at Guantánamo and who is being held on the basis of insufficient evidence have also been reinforced. In 58 habeas cases spanning both George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s administrations, federal judges have determined that in 36 of the cases there is insufficient evidence to hold these individuals and that often the detention was based on information obtained through hearsay, frequently the result of torture. In other words, the little evidence that existed was largely unreliable.
The sad fact is that these documents tell us more about ourselves than about the detainees. They tell us that U.S. officials to this day know very little based on hard evidence about the majority of those who have been held at Guantánamo, that assessments of risk have all too often been based on flights of imagination that tend to enhance the sense of power and capability of al Qaeda, and that the criteria for determining risk are at best murky. Those deemed to pose a risk ranged from individual detainees who proclaimed angry threats against their guards to those who were believed to have been actively involved in terrorism.
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once pointed out, in reference to the failure to find evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Although the quip may seem facile, it is actually a candid assessment of what has gone wrong at Guantánamo from the time it opened in January 2002. It continues to go wrong to this day. The proper, lawful, most security-minded restatement of Rumsfeld’s maxim would be this: Absence of evidence requires better intelligence, more careful judgments, and more savvy realism. Without facts, it is not only the just treatment of detainees that is at issue — it is the security of the United States itself.
Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law and author of
0 Comments on Inside the vacuum of ignorance as of 1/1/1900
img src="http://img2.imagesbn.com/images/63580000/63581291.JPG" align="right" hspace="5">On my latest trip to the library, I scored their copy of the Sibert honor book, Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan, illustrated by Brian Floca, which tells the story of the creation of Appalachian Spring - the original ballet created by Martha Graham in the 1940s.
Graham wrote the story that she wanted the ballet to tell and sent it to Aaron Copeland, so he could write the music. He rejected her first story, so Graham rewrote it until Copeland was happy. He then created an entirely original score for the ballet based around the story Graham had written, keeping in mind her style of dance and choreography. Graham then started to work out the choreography with a small group of dancers, asking the artist Isamu Noguchi to design the set for her - which included structures and something resembling furniture (a stylized rocking chair).
The book describes Graham's creative process, often using simple declarative sentences. It provides tremendous detail along the way, including the exact composition of the orchestra that played at the first performance in Washington, D.C. It describes the dances within the ballet and the music that accompanies it.
In many cases, I might have questioned whether I really needed to know that the orchestra was composes of "[a] piano, four violins, two violas . . . and a bassoon", but to be truthful, that recitation precedes the entry of the dancers onto the stage, and although there is nothing poetic or complex about how the text on the page is written, I distinctly had that feeling that Emily Dickinson once mentioned in a letter when describing poetry: I physically felt "as if the top of my head were taken off".
A gorgeous book, both text and images. I leave you with this quote from the introduction, which applies to the book as well as to the ballet it describes:
Sometimes art is made by one artist, working alone, but sometimes it is the result of artists working together -- collaborating-- to forge something new.
Karen Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at New 
York University School of Law. Her newest book, The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days, is a gripping narrative account of the first 100 days at Guantanamo and an analysis of how this time set up patterns of power that would come to dominate the Bush administration’s overall strategy in the “War on Terror.” Below is an excerpt from the very beginning of the book. Be sure to watch tonight when Greenberg appears on The Daily Show.
Two days after Christmas, the decision was announced to the public. Donald Rumsfeld made it official. The new detention operation would be set up at Guantanamo Bay. SOUTHCOM would supervise the activities on the base. The 2nd Force Service Support Group, normally based at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina, would run the effort. It would be a joint command, combining the efforts of the various branches of the U.S. military. The name of the joint task force would be JTF 160-the very same label that had been used for the task force during the migrant crisis.
Relying on the patriotism of the forces on the ground and their obedience to the chain of command, Secretary Rumsfeld anointed Guantanamo in defiance not just of warnings from the past, but of military professionalism.
True, the military men and women on the ground, their superiors at SOUTHCOM, the interagency group in Washington, and the Pentagon all seemed to agree with one another. In the shadow of 9/11, they all wanted to do the patriotic thing-which in this case was to help General Franks get rid of the prisoners under his command. But the ready assent was the beginning of a long, slow slide into an untenable and, as it would turn out, extralegal situation that would be more and more difficult to end with each phase of its existence.
But underneath the narrative of agreement lay missteps and warning signs that would come to plague Guantanamo going forward and that were apparent even before the operation was up and running. Chief among these exceptions to the norm had been the subversion of process that had been illustrated in the exclusionary and secretive way in which the Military Order of November 13 had been drafted and turned into policy, a habit that would come to define the Bush administration through its eight years.
This bureaucratic exclusivity would grow in its destructive impact as Guantanamo came into being, but for the moment, there was a more pressing danger, one that lay outside of the usurpation of powers in Washington or the extralegal premises of Guantanamo, and one that was overlooked by those making policy in D.C. This was the danger posed by the fact that the United States military was not quite equipped to handle the mission that was about to be handed them-that of detaining prisoners of war. It wasn’t just that the naval base itself was being asked to perform well above its capacity in terms of resources. It was also a matter of professional expertise. The nation’s military did not have the requisite expertise in prisoner of war detention, as the United States had not had to deal with prisoners of war on its own since World War II.
Nor was it helpful that the military was to conduct the operation on the blueprint of migrant detention operations. The task at hand and the professional skills readily available to the Pentagon did not match up. The plan for the detention effort that JTF 160 was given stood on the books as a migrant crisis operation, a template that ironically had itself struggled with definitional terms when it forbade the use of the term “refugee” for the camp’s residents. Now, in the year 2001, the definition of terms was intentionally obfuscated once again. No matter what words were used, prisoner incarceration was not equivalent to migrant detention. Captives were neither refugees nor migrants; they demanded a whole other kind of treatment and a separate set of policies. This lack of expertise was further hindered by the fact that the job of SOUTHCOM was to deal with the countries and of the Caribbean and Latin America and issues germane to that geographical part of the globe. Thus, its knowledge base was largely irrelevant when it came to Middle Eastern and South Asian culture.
Though Guantanamo may have provided a legal godsend and a logistically manageable environment, deeper realities suggested that trouble lay ahead for the detention facility. It stood not just on historical precedent and legal opportunism but on the unstable ground of secrecy, disregard for professionalism and expertise, and a legal flexibility. The deployed of JTF 160 to Guantanamo was an emergency act, done in lieu of a better option-the least worse choice for the least worst place.
No one understood better the treacherous pragmatic-and moral-implications of sidesteppping established law and policy than the man chosen to command the detention operation there.
I have not craved to read a current book in quite some time, but I am excited and interested to read yours. I have so many questions about Guantanamo and how we came to create it. I look forward to it!