Destinations

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show had a hilarious riff about some pretty serious business, the suicide of three American-held not-quite-prisoners-of-war, but maybe-not-criminals at Guantanamo Bay.

Now, there's some debate about just how many Gitmo prisoners are actually "enemy combatants," a phrase that has no basis in law. Nevertheless, these guys are being held in the war on terror, which, from the bad guys' side, resembles a guerrilla war. Without a doubt, those guys recognize the value of publicity, such that they target reporters for kidnappings because they know it will get disproportionate coverage.

All that said, that same idea can be taken to an extreme -- and, unfortunately, was, by an American bureaucrat: "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move to draw attention." All this, of course, comes from Colleen Graffy. A deputy assistant secretary of state. For public diplomacy. Who works for the person appointed by the American president to improve America's image abroad. It ain't working:

In Britain, where Graffy made her remarks, the reaction has been particularly negative, and calls for the closure of Guantanamo have gotten louder. A Reuters-UK article on the subject noted, "Nine British citizens have been held in Guantanamo Bay. All returned to Britain and none has been charged.

Several appeared in media interviews over the weekend in which they said they were not surprised that inmates had killed themselves."

If only as a "good PR move", it's time for the Bush Administration to close Guantanamo down.

A Washington Post columnist cites the case of one of those British prisoners, Moazzam Begg:

"It is considered a sin in Islam to despair," he writes, but after he was transferred to a solitary cell at Guantanamo in 2003, Begg began to crack. The guards seemed obsessed with preventing suicide. Begg received an odd plastic blanket, for example, and later learned that it was a "suicide blanket" that couldn't be torn up to make a noose. When guards found paint chipped in his cell, they worried that he was trying to poison himself.

A prison psychiatrist explained to Begg that there had indeed been suicide attempts: "She told me there were people who'd lost all sense of time, reason, reality; people who had been kept in a solitary cell, completely blocked off with no window, eight foot by six, like mine, but with absolutely nobody to speak to, nobody. She said some of them just ended up talking to themselves." A despairing Begg writes at one point to his father back in England: "I still don't know what crime I am supposed to have committed. . . . I am in a state of desperation and I am beginning to lose the fight against depression and hopelessness."

This doesn't do much for the arguments that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. The Washington Post's David Ignatius sums up Gitmo:

When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp -- not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.

The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That's what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S. statements tactfully disavowed the initial ones.

Speaking about a different context, Sen. John McCain argued that the United States needs to keep a true moral superiority: "If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort. The mistreatment of prisoners harms us more than our enemies."