Is Gitmo creating terrorists?
by Politico.com
Monday March 23, 2009, 5:45 AM
mlive.com
Is the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, erected after Sept. 11 to imprison “the worst of the worst” of America’s enemies, creating terrorists? With Attorney General Eric Holder’s recent announcement that some Gitmo detainees may be released in the U.S., the question has never been more relevant.
After a January Pentagon report found that 61 former detainees had engaged in terrorist activities, several commentators concluded the answer was yes and suggested that conditions at the prison are to blame.
This may surprise you, but as a staunch proponent of the prison, I agree. But while many liberal commentators believe inhumane treatment and religious persecution transforms detainees into suicide bombers and high-level terrorists, I believe the opposite is true: that the unprecedented and extreme religious accommodation granted to Gitmo prisoners has created a culture of Islamic radicalization.
When news of the Pentagon report broke, some liberal pundits reflexively accused the American military. MSNBC flame-thrower Keith Olbermann told his audience about ex-Taliban fighter Said Ali al-Shihri, who, upon his release from Gitmo, became an Al Qaeda leader and was responsible for an attack on the American embassy in Yemen. Then Olbermann asked wryly, “What if he wasn’t a terrorist in the first place but we turned him into one by sending him to Gitmo?”
A recent Washington Post cover story asked, “Did Guantanamo turn an accused low-level Taliban fighter into a suicide bomber?” After four years at Gitmo, the “low-level” fighter, Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi, drove a truck-full of explosives into an Iraqi army base outside Mosul, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and injuring 42 others.
And BBC commentators speculated that harsh treatment of Binyam Mohamed, who returned to London after becoming the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Barack Obama, can be blamed for any terrorist acts he may commit in the future.
According to this view, Gitmo is, as Amnesty International describes it, “the gulag of our time.” In the words of Mr. Ajmi’s attorney, “Guantanamo took a kid ... who wasn’t all that bad and turned him into a hostile, hardened individual.”
Given the media attention devoted to cases of alleged detainee abuse — who can forget Newsweek’s Koran-in-the-toilet story? — this theory may seem plausible. But such cases are more notorious than they are numerous. Most of the nearly 800 detainees who have passed through Gitmo since 9-11 have been treated humanely, their religious liberty respected.
In fact, that was the upshot of a recently released Pentagon review, which found that conditions at Guantanamo were in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. Holder visited in late February and came away “impressed.” Then there is Mohammed Ismail, who, at a press conference upon his release from Gitmo in 2004, praised his treatment, saying, “They gave me a good time at Cuba.” Ismail was later captured participating in an attack on U.S. forces in Kandahar, Afghanistan.
Media reports of life at Gitmo highlight the extreme accommodation of religious practice. Prison guards go through special sensitivity training. Each Muslim detainee is provided with a Koran, which, in accordance with Muslim teaching, is never touched by non-Muslims (i.e. the prison guards). Each prisoner receives prayer beads, culturally appropriate halal meals, prayer rugs, daily calls to prayer, and each cell contains a stenciled arrow pointing the way to Mecca.
The vast majority of Guantanamo detainees are housed in facilities where they can associate freely with one another. New arrivals are often placed in cells next to radical Islamists, who preach hatred of America and that dying in jihad is the only sure way to eternal salvation. Inmates are urged to memorize the Koran and participate in study groups. Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders are appointed as cell block leaders, and the prisons have councils of elders, which issue fatwas to other detainees.
It appears there is plenty of time for terrorist meetings at Gitmo. Recently, five detainees whom the Bush Administration accused of planning the 9/11 attacks proudly admitted their guilt. The New York Times reports that the men filed a document with a U.S. military judge titled, “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” The five described the 9/11 attacks and the murder of 3,000 Americans as a “model” of Islamic action and called the accusations against them “a badge of honor.” The Times said the Islamists wrote the document “at meetings they are permitted to conduct periodically at the detention camp.”
Harsh treatment regularly comes from the prisoners themselves. Muslim detainees who decline to submit to radicalization are ostracized. As one Afghan detainee told the Miami Herald, “There were detainees who did not pray or who spoke with female soldiers. We stopped speaking with these men. Sometimes we beat them.” The culture of radicalization is so pervasive at Gitmo that some former U.S. officials have called it the “American madrassa.”
None of this is to say that all prisoners are radicalized at Gitmo. Logic tells us that if someone is imprisoned for terrorist activity and then, upon his release, commits a terrorist act, he probably was predisposed to the deadly action.
This puts us between the rock and the hard place of Obama’s Gitmo policy. He has signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison but has not announced where the approximately 245 remaining detainees will go. Recent Supreme Court decisions make it unlikely they will be tried in U.S. civilian courts, and states with prisons that could house the detainees have made it clear they do not want them.
Many countries are unwilling to take the prisoners, and some that do will commute their sentences. Another possibility would be to incarcerate them at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where more than 600 prisoners have already been detained. But there simply is no option superior to holding the enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay.
Whatever Obama decides to do, it is likely that some detainees will be released and, after years of radicalization at Gitmo, some may take up arms or suicide belts and join the jihad. If they do, it will be the accommodation, not suppression, of religious freedom at Guantanamo that’s to blame.
Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer served as President Ronald Reagan’s domestic policy adviser. He is chairman of the Campaign for Working Families and president of American Values. |
