How many days could you spend alone in a small cell with a locked steel door?
Well, you wouldn’t technically be alone.
There would be prisoners on the other side of the cement walls, but the sound-dispersing molding would prevent you from communicating with them.
These are the conditions that have spurred detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to resume a hunger strike begun late last year.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a Kuwaiti prisoner told his lawyer that 42 prisoners were participating in the strike, although military officials have claimed that inmates’ estimates are exaggerated.
On top of that, 12 prisoners were reportedly subjected to force-feeding, which entails being strapped to a restraint chair and having a plastic tube shoved up your nose and down your throat.
The change in accommodations isn’t the only issue aggravating the prisoners.
“We don’t have any rights here,” Majid al-Joudi, a hunger striker at Guantanamo, told a military doctor, warning that the strikes would continue unless some changes were made.
But why should they have rights? After all, they must all be terrorists, since the government arrested them in the first place.
The purpose of Guantanamo is to make the world a safer place by keeping dangerous people locked up.
“The whole purpose of setting up Guantanamo Bay is for torture,” said Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, a lawyer in the U.S. Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, expressed a different opinion to Vanity Fair.
Swift described how, during his assignment from the U.S. government to defend “enemy combatants,” or prisoners, at Guantanamo, he was forced to work under a very peculiar set of circumstances.
His clients did not have the right to habeas corpus (knowing the reason why they’ve been rotting in jail, separated from friends and family for years), would be forced to submit guilty pleas for charges that would never be made public, and could have secret and coerced evidence submitted at their “trials” ““ which are presided over by officers and juries appointed by the president.
Accused serial killers and child molesters have more rights and have cushier treatment in prison than inmates at Guantanamo who haven’t been charged with any crime.
The problem with the inmates in Guantanamo is that most are not American citizens, and therefore, their circumstances do not generate very much sympathy or outrage from the American public. Americans can’t relate when Mohammed Jassim Ali from far-away, scary Iraq is put in prison.
But if Mark Smith, your white next-door neighbor, was imprisoned for five years for no reason, that would probably make us uneasy.
And we already should be.
Because, as Swift said in his interview, “Justice is based on a simple idea: It can happen to you.”
American Jose Padilla’s criminal past and visits to the Middle East made him an unsympathetic figure when he was deemed an “enemy combatant” by the government in 2002.
Regardless, Padilla is an American citizen, with the same rights as you and I, and the government still took the liberty of imprisoning him for over three years before charging him with a crime.
Under the Military Commissions Act, which congress passed to get around the Supreme Court’s ruling that prisoners in Guantanamo are entitled to habeas corpus, anyone the government deems an “enemy combatant” can be held and interrogated indefinitely.
The very structure of our government emphasizes the importance of reining in power. The legislative branch can overrule the executive branch; the judicial branch can declare legislation unconstitutional.
But with the Bush Administration acting as accuser, judge and jury in Guantanamo, abuse of power will continue.
There are rumors that the newly elected Democratic congress will amend the Military Commissions Act. Keep track of this issue, and if they do, remember them when you go to vote next election.
It’s much less demanding than a hunger strike.
If you think this column makes Strickland worthy of the “enemy combatant” label, e-mail her at kstrickland@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.