Last week I spent three nights at Gitmo, as Guantánamo Bay is called by insiders. The abbreviation separates the insider from the outsider.
That’s probably why armies all over the world are in love with abbreviations.
I arrived there on a rainy Monday night together with two journalists from Canada (Toronto Star) and one from the UK (Daily Telegraph). I was lucky. In the old days, 25 journalists were shepherded through the camps at the same time.
It’s hard to avoid getting slightly sentimental while describing the Gitmo tour. It’s easy to forget that the detainees are “the worst of the worst."
Word got out a long time already that many of them are not even close to the “worst of the worst.” So is Gitmo an abomination, as the consensus says? Let me first quote my colleague from the Daily Telegraph, who told me during our last evening on the base, “I don’t share this idea that Gitmo is an abomination. There is definitely a need for a place like this. But it’s poorly run.” Many articles have appeared about how poorly it is run. I recommend the book Inside the Wire by a former U.S. sergeant who worked at Gitmo as translator.
The first night, when we were all assembled in the media room, a captain who was responsible for public relations at Gitmo compared the camp with a concentration camp in the Balkans.
Within seconds, the captain corrected himself and just spoke about plain old camps in the Balkans.
Let’s not make too much out of that. Let’s call it a Freudian slip.
On Tuesday, we were given the opportunity to interview two guards, a female and a male guard. They were surrounded by officers while answering our questions, so I would hesitate to call the interview “completely free.” The guards complained about detainees attacking them with feces, blood, urine and semen. We were also informed that many detainees hurl racial and sexist slurs at the guards.
Then I asked the male guard if he had any feelings for the detainees, many of whom he got to know quite intimately over the last couple of months.
“No sir,” he answered. “I’m professional.” Then I asked if he had any opinions about what was going on in the camps.
“No sir,” he said. “I do my job, that’s all. I’m given orders. I want my camp to run smoothly.” The other journalists didn’t seem to be bothered by these answers.
But I remember that not too long ago, the enemy used this line of reasoning as both a defense and an explanation.
If these are our friends who are protecting us from evil, maybe we don’t need enemies anymore. Maybe.