Why Guantánamo Bay is not & never will be a model prison despite today's claim

By Diane Silver

One thing that has always amazed me about George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of the gang running the war on terror is their blind spot. This isn't a little blind spot. It is as wide and deep as the ocean.

Ultimately, this nasty thing is going to defeat them. If the American people don't find a way to stop Bush, Cheney and company, that blind spot will also defeat all of us.

What they can't see is very simple: The people we are fighting and the people who support them are human beings.

OK, take a deep breath. I know you can grasp this, George, if you try. Once again: The people who are terrorists and the people who provide them with financial and logistical support are human beings.

They are human beings just like us. Really, they are. They have families. They love their children. They get their hearts broken at times. They have favorite songs and foods they like and hate. They are most likely fighting for what they think is right, and perhaps, they even believe the ends justify the means.

OK, now I'm going ask you to make another mental jump. (I know you can do it!)

How would we feel -- and how would our families and friends feel -- if someone threw us in a prison without charging us with anything and then threw away the key?

How would we feel -- and how would our friends and family feel -- if:

• there was no end in sight to our imprisonment
• no one could visit us
• the basic rights our captors claim for themselves are never available to us

Would everything be OK, if our cell was clean? Would it matter if we were well fed and had our holy book? How would you feel if you were faced with spending the rest of your life in a cell, as pictured above with no hope of release? The inserted picture, by the way, is supposedly of the detention center's bookless Library.

And just for today, I'm going to ignore all the reports of the mistreatment, and dare we say, torture of prisoners at Gitmo. Even without torture, even with the nicest cells in the universe (and frankly, that doesn't look like one, but I digress), even with all of that, Gitmo has got to be hell on Earth. It takes away the freedom and hope that every human needs.

The Everything-is-OK-at-Guantanamo Argument is exactly what Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis argued today in a New York Times op-ed column. Davis is the chief prosecutor in the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions. Davis writes:

Today, most of the detainees are housed in new buildings modeled after civilian prisons in Indiana and Michigan. Detainees receive three culturally appropriate meals a day. Each has a copy of the Koran. Guards maintain respectful silence during Islam’s five daily prayer periods, and medical care is provided by the same practitioners who treat American service members. Detainees are offered at least two hours of outdoor recreation each day, double that allowed inmates, including convicted terrorists, at the “supermax” federal penitentiary in Florence, Colo.

Standards at Guantánamo rival or exceed those at similar institutions in the United States and abroad. After an inspection by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in March 2006, a Belgian police official said, “At the level of detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons.”

When I was an insanely young newspaper reporter, I toured Jackson Prison in Michigan. It was one of the most terrifying places I have ever been. However, the prisoners there had it much better than anyone at Gitmo. That's because I will guarantee you that every single prisoner at Jackson Prison had a trial. Except for those sentenced to life, every single one knew he would be released some day.

That's something that the people at Gitmo don't have. If the Bushies get their way, apparently those human beings will never have the certainty that they will ever be free again. Everyone who loves them, everyone who knows their families will, thus, have an extremely personal reason to hate us and fight with all their might against the United States.

In his NY Times piece, Morris also defends the Military Commissions Act. Note that this is the law that gives the president absolute power to call you, me or anyone he likes enemy combatants and to toss us in prison forever.

That act gives Bush the power to define torture any way he likes. That act declares null and void a basic constitutional right our Founding Fathers thought was important enough to fight for -- that's the due process right of habeas corpus.

We cannot stop terrorism by making the world hate us. And anyone with any empathy is going to be hoping mad -- or outright terrified -- at the idea that the U.S. thinks it can swoop down and detain anyone for any length of time just because Bush says we should.

People fight when they are furious and terrified. We cannot win by keeping Gitmo open. Our policy of ignoring the humanity of our opponents (and their families, friends and neighbors) will defeat us. If it hasn't already.

Here is what Human Rights Watch says about Gitmo. See the ACLU's useful page explaining in detail why the Military Commission Act is more than a little un-American.

British military learns that openly serving gays are a huge "nonissue"

Allowing lesbians and gays to serve openly has strengthened the British military, The New York Times reports today. The Times talked about the experience of one squadron leader in the Royal Air Force.

Far from causing problems, he said, he found that coming out to his troops actually increased the unit’s strength and cohesion. He had felt uneasy keeping the secret “that their boss was a poof,” as he put it, from people he worked with so closely.

Since the British military began allowing homosexuals to serve in the armed forces in 2000, none of its fears — about harassment, discord, blackmail, bullying or an erosion of unit cohesion or military effectiveness — have come to pass, according to the Ministry of Defense, current and former members of the services and academics specializing in the military. The biggest news about the policy, they say, is that there is no news. It has for the most part become a nonissue.

The only problem appears to be a sensitivity to embarrassing us timid Americans who are still struggling with the unfair Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy.

And so it goes...

Support our (women) soldiers

The only civilization the United States should cherish is nothing less than that which men and women create together, intellectually and physically, and together defend, as equals in public and private.

By Nancy Jane Moore

So ends Erin Solaro's landmark book Women in the Line of Fire: What You Should Know About Women in the Military, published in 2006 by Seal Press.

Solaro, who has served in the Army Reserves and spent time with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, doesn't just make a feminist case that women have the right to serve in the military in all capacities, including combat; she also points out that women have become an indispensable part of the armed forces and that the restrictions on combat duty, far from keeping them safer, are putting them at greater risk.

She begins with a concept that first struck me back during the Vietnam War, when the men I knew had to deal with the draft and whether to fight, while women could only look at the subject intellectually: that "equal participation in the common defense" is the "last great barrier to women's full equality of citizenship."

Back in the 1970s, I had a serious argument on women in combat with a friend of mine who was a Vietnam veteran. I made the point that I didn't think women would gain equal rights until we had equal responsibilities to defend the country, and was shocked when he responded -- passionately -- that women didn't belong in combat. Ten years later, we revisited the conversation, and he told me that part of his emotional reaction to the idea of women in combat had to do with one simple feeling: If he hadn't been protecting others -- and particularly women -- by his service, it was meaningless.

He had given the subject enough thought by then to recognize his emotional reaction as something that had nothing to do with policy decisions on whether women should be in combat. And by that point, I could understand why someone might feel that way -- especially someone who served in a war fought for bad reasons like Vietnam. But as someone who has a visceral reaction to the idea that others should take care of me -- I hate the very idea -- I have always been aware of feeling like a second-class citizen because I wasn't permitted a role in the country's defense.

Solaro provides compelling data showing that women are capable of handling combat jobs -- and, indeed, are doing them in various makeshift ways -- but she goes much farther than providing proof that women can do the job. She faults the armed forces for not doing what they should have done to make sure that women were completely integrated into the military. Citing examples like the notorious Tailhook scandal of the early 1990s, she points out that the military did not take sexual harassment seriously.

In fact, in discussing the various discipline problems raised by those who object to women serving on an equal basis with men, Solaro demonstrates over and over that the bad actors -- the harassers, the troublemakers, the manipulators male and female -- are a small percentage of our soldiers. No-nonsense enforcement of rules against harassment and other misbehavior would solve most of the problem -- and come as a relief to the vast majority who don't approve of it.

In this and many other ways, Solaro says, the military failed the women it recruited into the service. By limiting their training and their job opportunities, they kept women from gaining their full potential as soldiers and put them at risk in the field, especially in modern combat where the lines of engagement are not so clearly defined.

One example she discusses in depth really resonated with me: The maximum weight for women soldiers is less than that for men soldiers of the same height. For example, in the case of young soldiers who are 5 foot 9 inches tall, men can weigh up to 175 pounds, while women can only reach 154. Even for those over 40, the maximums are 186 for men and 168 for women. As Solaro points out, given that muscle weighs more than fat, women are put at a severe disadvantage for reaching their maximum strength by these artificial limits, which are based on an assumption that all women should weigh less than men, and do not take into account such obvious differences as body type and bone structure.

A recent article in The New York Times about large women basketball players that focused on Courtney Paris, a basketball player at the University of Oklahoma, brought this issue home. According to the website USA Basketball, Paris, who plays center, is 6'3" and weighs 250 pounds. She also holds a record for most rebounds in a season and was named All-American as a freshman. According to the charts Solaro lists in her book, Paris -- who is obviously fit on a demanding physical scale -- could only weigh 183 pounds if she were in the military.

Now it's probably true that the optimum size for a basketball player is larger than for a soldier, but Paris is just an obvious example of the fact that women come in a large variety of shapes and sizes, and many of those sizes are healthy and physically fit.

Solaro also brings up a point that I had never considered, but that I find very perceptive: Up until the 20th Century, the risk of dying in childbirth in the U.S. was incredibly high, and only in the second half of that century did it drop to the low rate we expect today. In earlier times, when childbirth was riskier and the need for most women to reproduce was much more important, it made much more sense to protect women from combat for the survival of the clan -- or even the species. However, this is not a factor in the U.S. today.

Solaro also has some harsh words for some of the feminist movement, which she says used women soldiers to fight other kinds of political battles without really respecting or understanding their desire to serve in combat. Certainly there are some feminists who would like to think that women aren't "violent" and that this is a virtue. I tend to lump those people in with the victim feminists, who have been willing ally themselves with the religious right in a move to outlaw pornography -- at the expense of the First Amendment -- because they don't believe women can protect themselves from men.

Despite Solaro's scathing critique of the barriers facing women in the military, she is, essentially, optimistic. Discrimination against women soldiers is ending not simply because it's the right thing to do, but because women have become a necessary part of the military and are fighting well. Dealing with the problems she details in this book will free women soldiers from putting up with unnecessary nonsense, and allow them to become the kind of fine troops we need.

And full acceptance of women in all aspects of the military -- including fighting on the front lines and making the combat decisions at the highest levels -- will knock down the last barriers blocking women from full participation in our society.

Janet Reno & Republicans detail the horrors of the Military Commissions Act

Former Attorney General Janet Reno, two former U.S. attorneys appointed by Ronald Reagan and other former justice department officials are going public about their concerns about the Military Commissions Act and George W. Bush's treatment of detainees.

Their concerns are detailed in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. The Washington Post reports this is the first time Reno has spoken out against the administration. The brief is well worth reading.

(W)e are gravely concerned that indefinite imprisonment of individuals within the United States will become increasingly common -- that the government will choose to avoid criminal prosecutions and the rights associated with them, such as the defendant's right to counsel and the government's obligation to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

In other words, they can lock you up and throw away the key, and you are helpless to defend yourself. This is about as un-American as a law can get.