Once and Future Gitmo
Dec 4, 2014
At the American base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the radio station bills itself as "Rockin' in Fidel's Backyard," there's a McDonald's, a Jamaican Jerk House, a Starbuck's, and the most notorious prison in recent world history, where our government has stashed people to torture and hide from the eyes of the world.
The prison has been in the news recently, a little bit, because Obama's maneuvering to close the place down has been beaten back by Congress once again, and not just by Republicans either. The one place on earth that has come to symbolize America's most feverish embrace of the dark side will keep on keeping on.
Prisoners there were called "enemy combatants" in the Bush dialect of Orwellian newspeak; in the Obama dialect, they have been renamed "unprivileged enemy belligerents." They're not awaiting trial. Mostly, they're waiting to die.
The nightmare that is imprisonment at Guantanamo has become less intensely violent over the years; much of the torture nowadays involves tedium and despair, which never go away. Suicide attempts have been frequent, and an unknown number have succeeded; hunger strikes are ongoing, and they are dealt with aggressively. The prison's military management will not release details.
Here's what they will tell us: there is a trailer at Guantanamo that serves as the prison library. No law books are allowed, unless you count John Grisham novels. But there are hundreds of video games, 2,100 movies, and 20,000 books, 90% of them in Arabic. Movies are censored: low violence, no sex.
The Guantanamo MickeyD's is a couple of miles away from the prison complex, near the living quarters of the base's American personnel and dependents. A decade or so ago, when prisoner interrogation was so urgently "enhanced," a story made the rounds that detainees who cooperated were being rewarded with Happy Meals.
The "worst of the worst" could be bribed with Happy Meals? Move them to Florida then.