Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures at Guantánamo Bay (4.2 megs)
On November 7th, 2007, a file called gitmo-sop.pdf appeared on Wikileaks, a Web site dedicated to the disclosure and distribution of information suppressed by governments and corporations. (Wikileaks is a Western site, with Western ethics, that tends to be most heavily involved in leaking documents classified by the government of the People's Republic of China, but they'll "target" any institution suppressing legitimate information.) The file purports to be the Standard Operating Procedure for Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the U.S. prison camp often referred to as Guantánamo, or just Gitmo. The file is dated March 28th, 2003. It was and is available for download from Wikileaks's secure server for the extra-cautious, and is now available here on Unlikely.
The file is classified UNCLASSIFIED/FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY, which means that employees of the Department of Defense need no particular clearance to read it, but it is not for distribution for those who are not affiliated with Gitmo. In other words, it is to be distributed on a need-to-know basis. The American Civil Liberties Union, in particular, has tried to acquire the document under the Freedom of Information Act, and has been repeatedly denied.
On Wednesday, November 14th, Wired and the Miami Herald reported on the leak. A few hours later, Wikileaks received the following:
From: "Quinn, Daniel, CIV (L)"
To:
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:24:54 +0000 (GMT)
Subject: Guantanamo Bay SOP [U]
CLASSIFICATION:UNCLASSIFIED
Good afternoon,
We've been notified and have since viewed the document at this link http://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/Gitmo-sop.pdf and found it labeled For Official Use Only (FOUO). Information with the FOUO label is not approved for release to the public. It can be made available through a Freedom Of Information Act request through official channels. Is it possible to have the document removed from your site? Thank you.
v/r=20
Mr. Daniel Quinn Jr
Information Security Manager
HQ USSOUTHCOM
"Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark=20
CLASSIFICATION:UNCLASSIFIED
Rather than comply, they published the letter, which seems to confirm the legitimacy of the document. I became aware of the document around this time, and surfed to Wikileaks to see it. The link to the document was not working, presumably due to server overload. After a few minutes, the entire Wikileaks site went down, and it's gone up and down pretty often since, as their servers are strained by demand for the four-megabyte document.
I acquired the file through peer-to-peer technology, and began to search the web for bloggers' analyses and mainstream media coverage. That Wednesday evening, there wasn't much—the bloggers had begun to notice the event, but the file is 238 pages long, and was going to take a few days for the nonprofessionals to analyze. The mainstream media had just noticed, and it seems the DOD noticed because they did. The file was easily obtained via peer-to-peer, but Wikileaks was still the only distribution point for the less 'Net-savvy, and they clearly didn't have the bandwidth necessary for the demand (and still don't, as of this November 30th writing). So, scrambling to put together our behind-schedule mid-November issue, I considered my responsibility as a self-declared, wholly narcissistic member of the Fourth Estate.
huh-huh. member.
On Thursday, media reports on the file were spreading, but the file itself was not. There seemed to me a decent possibility that, while media reports on the file were likely to continue, the file itself might no longer be available to the public in the near future. Wikileaks has a system of anonymity in place, in the hopes of protecting its volunteers against government retribution; I don't. If I republished the document, and the DOD sent me a request to cease and desist, it would be impractical to refuse. So I republished the document under the title "Incontrovertible Proof of a Benevolent and Omnipresent God." I figured that, although no one searching for the document would find the copy I was distributing, I could at least continue to offer it to existing Unlikely readers as long as possible. I uploaded it Thursday night (Albuquerque time) and sent the link to the Unlikely staff, the contributors for the mid-November issue, and a few friends, unaware that The Guardian Unlimited, out of London, was simultaneously preparing the document for download, making my efforts redundant. But that is, of course, what I hoped would happen.
Friday morning, when I got up, a staffer quit, saying "you're scaring the shit out of me." I received the expected host of e-mails from people angry with me for "conservatism," meaning a belief in God. I pointed them back to the link until they read it, however many hours after they reacted to it. I surfed news blogs far more than was enjoyable, and found that the document was being reproduced, under the correct name, at the libertarian Code Piranha and the conservative-ish Suitably Flip. I internally questioned their ability to mount a legal defense against the DOD. On Saturday, the Guardian's decision to reproduce the document showed up in my Googling, ending my little drama. From this experience, I have learned that most writers decrying the government will immediately silence themselves at even a hypothetical sign of the possibility of future danger, and the other "liberal" writers don't read anything longer than their own fan mail.
Those obvious-yet-useless observations aside, there's the question of what the document really says. The Internet is now brimming with more experienced and insightful analyses than I can offer, including that of psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz, which we've reprinted in this issue. I do consider a few facts to be most significant:
- The document contains no instructions for the physical torture of prisoners; indeed, it expressly condemns it. This is hardly surprising—when the world became aware that the US military was conducting torture in the Abu Ghraib Prison, it wasn't thanks to a SOP manual.
- The document contains instructions for using isolation as an interrogation technique. Stephen Soldz, and many others, refer to this as psychological torture. It would be illegal for US officers to perform these techniques on prisoners of war, but since isolation is routinely and legally used to punish convicted criminals within US prisons, these instructions don't surprise me, either.
- The document expressly states that some prisoners are denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. This is the "smoking gun" of the document, as the White House denied, while the document was current, that such a system was in place, and have responded to the exposure of this particular lie with a declaration that the document is out of date, revealing to the public that the White House does not consider it inappropriate to tell direct lies to the American public.
I, uh, guess we knew that last part already.
The lies and crimes of the Bush Administration have become so blatant and numerous since its inception, and so well-documented for those willing to read news reports published outside of the US, that the lies about the Red Cross seem rather mundane. Above, I contrast prisoners of war to convicted criminals, but the detainees in Gitmo are neither. They are suspects, accused (perhaps rightly) of crimes against the US and detained without conviction. Gitmo is an egregiously illegal and immoral institution, in flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention, US law and tradition, and the advice of the United Nations.
At this point, the revelations of the leaked gitmo-sop.pdf document are less than stunning. That the Bush Administration is so little embarrassed by being caught in another crime is wholly unsurprising. But I am consistently heartbroken by the fact that the Administration still has supporters who are not direct financial beneficiaries. Ignorance can no longer explain such political leanings; only fear of "the other" and a willingness to self-destruct.
Perhaps ignorance can explain our willingness to believe the 2008 elections will effect change. While American journalist and BBC employee Greg Palast has carefully and thoroughly documented election fraud on the part of the Republican Party in 2000 and 2004, and he is a New York Times bestselling author, I think we can safely say that most Americans aren't reading him. Still, there's a determined naïveté, shredded but surviving, among well-read Americans, assuring us that another electronic election really will cause everything to turn out OK.
Like the narrator (and author) of Steppenwolf, we Americans live in a country both doomed and damned, one that will decay into psychopathy before obsolescence. We've had a good, if brief, run. We've had some great art. But we, as a people, will not commit the necessary self-sacrifices to avoid our malevolent future.
For those of us willing to do what we can to effect positive change, the situation is infuriating, but has its advantages. Unlike previous American generations, we are relieved of the responsibility of saving the world. We can't. We can exhibit courage. We can practice learning. We can learn compassion. And like Herman Hesse, we can stand in testament to future generations and the rest of the world that every nation, however mad, is not comprised entirely of madmen. Such behavior is against our training, but it is within our grasp. Our behavior might not matter much now, but there is historical precedent for believing that it will.
