In the rush of recent news about renditions, extraordinary renditions, the beating to death and systematic abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan, the holding of children as young as 11 in Abu Ghraib prison, the desire of Donald Rumsfeld to transfer large numbers of prisoners in Guantánamo back to their countries of origin, and other tales of detention mayhem, a piece tucked away in the crease column, deep inside last Tuesday’s New York Times, was easy enough to overlook. According to Neil A. Lewis (U.S. Eroding Inmates’ Trust at Cuba Base, Lawyers Say), “Defense lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, say the military has been working to undermine the inmates’ trust in them.”

The Guantánamo authorities have, prisoners claim, sent in lawyer-act-alikes in civvies to question them (and take away their papers), punished them in various small ways after they conferred with their actual lawyers, and “in one case, a lawyer said, a military interrogator recently told a detainee that he should not trust his lawyers because they are Jews.” Here’s the full passage on that gem, which could have come directly out of Saudi Arabia:

“Mr. Wilner [a defense lawyer] said that when he interviewed a Kuwaiti, a 28-year-old whom he declined to name, the man told him that his interrogator was a young woman known to him as Meghan. He described her as attractive and blond with shoulder-length hair and said she had engaged in the kind of flirtatious techniques that have been the basis of accusations that female interrogators have tried to flaunt themselves sexually… ‘She told him several times not to trust his lawyers,’ Mr. Milner said. He said she told the detainee that he would be tortured if he returned to Kuwait. When the detainee said his lawyer had told him otherwise, she replied: ‘Don’t trust your lawyers. Don’t you know they’re Jews?’”

 

Lt. Col. Brad K. Blackner, spokesman for the joint task force that runs the detention center, has denied that any of this took place, adding, “We are not going to respond in the media to every claim [by a defense lawyer]… Where appropriate, those matters will be addressed as part of the litigation process.” Given that the wildest prisoner stories seeping out of Guantánamo over the years (like women interrogators smearing menstrual blood — evidently red ink or paint — on Muslim prisoners as an act of intended humiliation) proved accurate and the calmest of denials from American officials proved false, I think it’s clear enough who should be believed in this case. It’s a small reminder of a basic attitude towards lawyers, the law, and the courts that’s imprisoned deep in the heart of this administration. A sense of impunity — an old-fashioned but useful word — rules the thinking of its officials; legalities that stand in their way are seen as essentially contemptible.

Karen J. Greenberg, who runs NYU’s Center on Law and Security and is co-author of a monumental volume, The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, has offered a run-down on the Bush administration’s over-hyped, less-than-striking legal battle with terrorism in our courts and suggests that that sense of impunity and contempt has worked its way deep into the Department of Justice’s efforts to deal with terrorism here. (The FBI, by the way, recently suggested that maybe the al-Qaeda version of terrorism wasn’t exactly a major presence in this country.) It’s not surprising then that what Greenberg calls “a pale version” of the coercive methods of Guantánamo has already found its way into the Justice Department’s process of plea bargaining with the various small-fry suspects it has managed to pick up in this country. Anyone who believes that Americans can use Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib methods abroad, safe from all versions of them at home, is living in his or her own bubble.

 

 

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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