"Envious" of Guantanamo Bay Detention Facilities?
Colonel Morris Davis, chief prosecutor for the military commissions, writes about Guantanamo Bay in the online companion to Yale Law Journal:
What I see is a clean, modern facility that employs humane detention practices to prevent enemy combatants from causing harm in the future and that utilizes fair trial procedures that exceed standards accepted in comparable international tribunals to adjudicate the guilt or innocence of enemy combatants alleged to have committed punishable offenses in the past. If truth be told, and often it is not, there is no compelling reason to cut and run from the detention facility or the military commissions. . . .Any notion that detainees are held in facilities that even remotely resemble Camp X-Ray or are subjected to abusive treatment is absolutely wrong. . . .
I have visited a number of military and civilian confinement facilities in the United States during the course of my career, and I believe many of our own incarcerated citizens would be envious of the treatment afforded to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. . . . I honestly believe the standards at Guantanamo Bay rival any at similar facilities I have seen in the United States.
Attorney Thomas Sullivan wrote earlier about his experiences representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Those who are inclined to belittle the protestations of do-good lawyers who represent the prisoners would do well to visit the prison and see first hand the conditions in which these men are held. Most of them are kept in 24/7 isolation, without proper medical attention, or decent food, or diversions such as radio, television, books, newspapers, magazines, or reading material other than the Koran.By design, most have no contact with fellow prisoners, and only limited opportunities for exercise.
They are housed in rectangular cubicles, actually small cages measuring from 6x8 to 7x10, with a raised concrete slab and mattress for a bed, a toilet and wash basin. The walls are made of fine wire mesh which impairs distance vision if looked through for extended periods.
In most of the camps, physical contact among prisoners is prohibited, and oral communication is restricted to shouting to those celled next to or across from the prisoner.
In Camp Six the walls are not porous, resulting in total isolation. All movements of prisoners require two armed guards, with the prisoners chained hand and food. . . .
The ways we are treating these men, and the conditions in which they are confined, are demeaning and cruel, not to mention totally unnecessary. Their "housing" resembles the cellblocks reserved for the most unruly prisoners in state and federal prisons, and their isolation is patterned on how we isolate those on death row.