Since the destruction of the Twin Towers, ten years and three months ago, two new edifices have risen. Both were the subject of contentious battles in courts, the political arena, and elsewhere; both have a way of provoking irrational responses. One is maddeningly unfinished, and the other disturbingly unclosed. But one, the new tower at Ground Zero, is beautiful; that is becoming more and more evident as it gets higher, and its façade refracts the light of different seasons. We can look at it with some pride. The other, the prison at Guantánamo Bay, which opened exactly ten years ago this Wednesday, is ugly, and only gets more so—distorting, rather than reflecting, our values. It is the bad twin.
And yet politicians, including most of the candidates running for the Republican nomination, treat Guantánamo as some sort of singular treasure. (Ron Paul is a notable exception.) Mitt Romney has said that far from closing the prison “we ought to double Guantánamo.” Gingrich has made a point of complaining about Boumediene v. Bush, a decision that affirmed the right to habeas corpus for prisoners. (The plaintiff in the case, Lakhdar Boumediene, told his story recently in the Times; one wonders if it would surprise most Americans to know that he was seized not on some battlefield in Afghanistan, but arrested in Sarajevo? Or that in the end, with something like a shrug, it became clear that there was no real case against him?) But decisions like Boumediene are among the few solaces of Guantánamo’s decade. They allow one to see the actual prisoners, and not a scratched-out caricature, and prevent the government from using Guantánamo not to securely guard our enemies but to hide our mistakes.
Or to prevent it to an extent: there are forty-six prisoners at Guantánamo now who have been designated for indefinite detention without a trial. The National Defense Authorization Act, recently passed, makes it possible for there to be more, in more places and in circumstances ever more attenuated from the day of the attacks in September. Obama may not be Bush’s twin on this issue, but there are disturbing resemblances.
The Miami Herald, in a package on the anniversary—the paper’s coverage of Guantánamo, and that of its reporter, Carol Rosenberg, has been consistently excellent—has a set of numbers about Guantánamo: a hundred and seventy-one prisoners still there, from twenty-three countries, ranging in age from twenty-five—Omar Khadr, who was captured when he was fifteen—to sixty-two. (Michelle Shephard, of the Toronto Star, who wrote a book about what she called our “Decade of Fear,” notes in a piece about the anniversary that the youngest prisoner ever held there was twelve, the oldest eighty-nine; she also notes that the base is about the size of Manhattan.) It has had eleven commanders in ten years, and some eight hundred prisoners have passed through. The first twenty arrived on January 11, 2002. Only six prisoners were ever convicted by a military commission. The Herald also included the story it ran on Guantánamo’s opening. The headline was “A New Alcatraz Rises: Guantánamo ready for Taliban.” In retrospect, that is almost optimistic: one wishes that Guantánamo had been more like Alcatraz, in terms of its integration into the American legal system. And Alcatraz, at least, is closed.
Photograph by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.
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