In response to questions, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in American prisons. Commander Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said with data showing that more than half of inmates in American correctional institutions had mental health problems.
Storum neglects to mention that prison inmates, unlike detainees, have already been tried and convicted. The mental health of prison inmates is a serious issue, but not one that typically implicates the right to a fair trial, at least when those problems are a consequence of imprisonment that follows a conviction. The Guantánamo detainees, on the other hand, have been detained for years without trial. Should the government be entitled to hold them in isolation until they lose their competence to defend themselves, and only then bring them to trial?
American prison inmates at least have the chance to stay in touch with those family members who have the resources to visit them or to accept their collect calls. Not so at Guantánamo.
In more than six years of detention, Mr. Hamdan has had two phone calls to his family and no visits. ... At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.
In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.
Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.
The government's insensitivity to the treatment of detainees would be remarkable if it were not so common. Its arguments are nonetheless laughable.
The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.”
The government also argues that Hamdan is "no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine." Gee, do you suppose that his behavior might have something to do with the conditions under which he's been held for more than half a decade?
Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky. ...
This winter, lawyers for Abdulghappar Turkistani, a detainee in Camp 6, received a letter describing life there. “Losing any contact with anyone,” he wrote, “also being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being.” ...
In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture.
So we torture detainees with inhumane conditions of confinement, year after year, and then expect them to be competent to assist in their defense? Only Bush administration loyalists could believe in this fantasy, could be so dismissive of American values, or could argue that this somehow keeps our country safe.
