Secrecy surrounds Guantanamo Bay

THE Defense Department’s expulsion of four journalists reporting from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this week is another reminder of how the Bush administration’s construction of an American gulag has undermined this country’s ability to prosecute the global struggle against Islamo-fascist terrorism.

The four, including The Times’ Carol J. Williams, had been covering the suicides last weekend of three prisoners, who hanged themselves in their cells. Though the journalists had gone to Guantanamo to report on other stories, the base commander gave them permission to stay and write about the suicides. The Pentagon ordered their expulsion and forbade a larger group of journalists, who previously had made arrangements to cover a hearing at the prison, from going to Cuba.

Officials claimed the reporters were excluded for security reasons and because military authorities need to focus on investigating the suicides, which involved two Saudis and a Yemeni. Journalistic access already is severely restricted. Reporters who obtain permission to visit the place are constantly accompanied by military minders and forbidden to talk to any inmates, and all photographs are censored.

In a struggle that’s as much about ideas and values as it is about bombs and bullets, it’s hard to see how whatever this administration conceives of as “success” at Guantanamo ever could amount to something other than a Pyrrhic victory.

There’s a lot that desperately needs to be learned about what imprisonment at Guantanamo really entails. In his new book, “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror,” physician Steven H. Miles, a University of Minnesota medical ethicist, writes that as many as 130 of the prisoners in Cuba have gone on hunger strikes since the first of this year. About 20% of these are being force fed, he says. “The principal grievances are prison abuses and indeterminate confinement.... The military physicians are ‘screened’ before deployment to Guantanamo ‘to ensure that they do not have ethical objections to force feedings.’... Clinicians inserted feeding tubes through the nose, down the esophagus, and into the stomach. If X-rays were required to confirm that the feeding tube was in the stomach rather than in the lungs, radiographers were also part of the system of force feeding. The clinicians monitored the feedings to normalize nutritional laboratory parameters while their patients’ arms, shoulders, legs and wrists were strapped to a chair whose manufacturer advertises as ‘a padded cell on wheels.’ ”

Force feeding of hunger striking prisoners whose conduct is uncoerced and who are “capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment” has been condemned by the World Medical Assn. since 1975. As Miles writes, “Physicians value the saving of life, although medical ethics strongly counsel against forcing treatment on competent persons who do not want it. Furthermore, if a hunger strike is motivated by the desire to stop torture, forced feeding is abusive treatment, essentially a way to revive the prisoner for continued abuse.”

According to some reports, the three men who killed themselves had been on hunger strikes.

Holding prisoners for years on end without charges or legal proceedings of any kind is the sort of Kafkaesque conduct the United States once routinely condemned in other nations. At the very least, it is the sort of mental abuse that could engender suicidal despair, though various administration and military officials have insisted that the three prisoners killed themselves for propaganda purposes.

The prison commander, Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said he does not believe the suicides were “an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

OK.

In the past, the administration also has grudgingly admitted that interrogations conducted at Guantanamo have involved what the United States used to routinely recognize as torture. Were any or all of the three dead propagandists ever tortured? Let’s imagine for a second somebody held for nearly five years without charges or hearing of any kind and periodically tortured while being led to believe that their confinement might continue forever. Might they be driven to take their own life for other than tactical reasons?

This week, the Pentagon acted decisively to make sure you don’t find out. Why?

As Anthony Romero, the American Civil Liberties Union’s executive director, said this week: “If the United States wants to restore its credibility as a democracy in the eyes of the world, it should be inviting journalists in, not kicking them out.”

We used to routinely make that point about places like the Soviet Union, China and Castro’s Cuba.

This week, the influential Egyptian news weekly Al Ahram began its report on the Guantanamo suicides this way: “The question posed by a new anti-torture advertisement that appeared in the New York Times Tuesday perhaps best captures the moral dilemma facing the United States, once the world champion of human rights.... The advertisement, signed by 27 leaders of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, asked: ‘What does it signify if torture is condemned in word but allowed in deed?’ ”

What, indeed.

Al Ahram’s Emad Mekay went on to point out that the group was formed to work against abuses at U.S. facilities, including Guantanamo, and that the advertisement’s signatories included “such heavyweights as Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington; Sayyid Syeed, secretary general of the Islamic Society of North America; and former President Jimmy Carter.” Not all that long ago, American journalists routinely filed stories on similar declarations from places like Prague and called the men and women who signed them “dissidents.” They were just as routinely hailed as heroes from podiums in the State Department and White House press rooms.

As the expulsion of all reporters and photographers from Guantanamo demonstrates, the Bush administration’s routine move is duck and cover.

It is, of course, important not to slip into a facile moral equivalency here. Though the United States has acted in defiance of its own humane legal traditions and in contravention of basic decency and international prohibitions on torture, it has not “sunk to the level” of its antagonists, as has been carelessly alleged. The current phase of this struggle began with Al Qaeda’s unprovoked and heinous assault on innocent civilians going peacefully about their daily lives. Everything done in the American nation’s name since then has occurred in response to those events. Acts of self-defense, however rash or disproportionate, are fundamentally different from acts of aggression in any meaningful moral sense.

But self-defense is not a blank check.

When the administration pulls down the shades on this country’s free press, as it did this week in Guantanamo, it’s because it knows it has something to hide -- and to fear. Its officials know that Americans are instinctively revolted by things like torture and immoral imprisonment and recognize shameful conduct for what it is, even if their leaders do not.