The Forever War’s Forever Legacy - TomDispatch.com

The Forever War’s Forever Legacy - TomDispatch.com Karen Greenberg, Guantánamo 21 Years Later August 1, 2023 For more than 18 years, Karen Greenberg has been writing about the crimes the U.S. committed at its offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It would be, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured Americans, "the least worst place" (a phrase Greenberg turned into the title of her book on the subject). Sorry, Don, but that was only true if you were comparing it to the "black sites" the CIA was already running then. From the moment it was set up in 2002, with the Global War on Terror just months old and the first (often already tortured prisoners) sent there, bound, hooded, and in fluorescent orange jumpsuits to be brutally mistreated beyond the shores of American justice, that prison has been a horror beyond compare. And as Greenberg showed in those years, the rest of us could have known just what was happening. Here's just one Guantánamo quote from the time: “On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more.” That was, in fact, typical of descriptions outraged FBI agents assigned to Gitmo in 2004 sent in memos or emails to their bosses back on the mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that “military personnel beat and kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison as military police snapped pictures,” and so it went. From that prison's very first day, when the initial 20 prisoners were flown in and, about a week later, the first publicity -- if you dare call it that! -- photo taken of them was released, as New York Times reporter Carol Rosenberg recalled, it looked "like torture." (The full set of photos, available years later, proved to be a first-class horror show.) Today, TomDispatch regular Greenberg, who has visited that prison and covered its horrors for endless years, considers the latest reports on the all-American nightmare that's simply never ended. Tom