According to two presidential transition team members, President Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order in his first week in office to shut down the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The plan comes after a long line of promises the president gave during his campaign, in his effort to rectify the previous administration’s failings regarding the proper treatment of terrorist suspects.
While Obama’s move to close the infamous prison serves as a good starting point, it is, by itself, insufficient in changing much of what’s wrong with the government’s current policy concerning detainees. Shutting down the Guantanamo Bay facility would be tantamount to covering up the symptoms of a diseased system, rather than offering an outright cure.
If Obama is to carry out his promise of making the conditions for detainees more humane and in accordance with international law, he would have to implement a massive transformation in governmental policy, rather than just physically close facilities.
Guantanamo Bay has become controversial in two respects.
First, reports about conditions in the facility have suggested abuse by prison guards that are contrary to statements made by the U.S. government. For example, numerous FBI papers have indicated complaints as far back as 2002 by inmates who allege that they were severely beaten by guards and that the Muslim holy book, the Koran, was mistreated on several occasions.
Reports such as these have arisen despite claims by Guantanamo Bay officials that inmates were being treated well, and that “extensive procedures were put in place to respect the cultural dignity of the Koran.” While many reports regarding abuse have yet to be proven, the experiences of the detainees in the Abu Ghraib facility suggest that the existence of prisoner abuse within the framework of U.S. detention facilities is possible.
The second divisive aspect of the facility comes from the Bush administration’s advocacy of torture as a means of obtaining information from prisoners. Recently, Susan Crawford, the retired judge in charge of determining which Guantanamo detainees should be tried by a U.S. military commission, publicly declared the government’s use of torture.
“The techniques they used were all authorized,” she said. “But the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent.”
According to Crawford, Mohammed Al-Qahtani, one of the victims of abuse, was forced to stand naked in front of a female agent and threatened with a military dog named Zeus. He was “forced to wear a woman’s bra and had a thong placed on his head” during questioning, and “was told that his mother and sister were whores.”
The president’s responsibility is thus twofold: first, to prevent abuse within the military detainment system, and second, to put a stop to “legal abuse” made possible through loopholes within governmental policy.
Psychologist and Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo believes that such occurrences of abuse happen in part due to environmental circumstances and a lack of oversight. Zimbardo headed the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, in which normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison. After only six days, the experiment had to be shut down because the guards started treating the prisoners brutally.
This psychological experiment offers a view into how prisoner abuse should be addressed. The study showed that these occurrences persist not necessarily because of “bad apples” but because circumstances have a way of warping typically decent people into perpetrators of abuse.
In this sense, greater government oversight is necessary for the prevention of prisoner abuse. Greater transparency given to third party groups such as United Nations and Amnesty International could also provide necessary checks within the U.S. system.
Obama also has to place a renewed interest in halting the inhumane treatment of prisoners via government-approved methods. While the current administration claims that suspected terrorists are not technically “soldiers” and are thus not protected under the stipulations of the Geneva Convention, this seems like a despicable attempt at circumventing the core values instilled in the conventions.
The Guantanamo facility was created outside U.S. shores so that terror suspects would not enjoy the same rights as U.S. citizens, which is a manifestation of moral dishonesty. A double standard of supposedly universal human rights arises: rights for “us,” and rights for those who are not “us.”
This is nothing short of hypocritical of the previous administration. While championing peace and justice for all, it seemed to only extend these rights to Americans. Such moral discrepancies reduce the government to a certain barbarity that should be inexistent in this modern day and age.
For Obama to set himself apart from the previous administration, numerous changes must be made to amend not only a flawed system, but also the damaged reputation of a nation. For the U.S. to once more be the emblem of freedom and justice in the world, it must become the change it wants to see.
E-mail Ong at rong@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.