Detainee with escort at Guantanamo Bay

President Bush has finally broken his silence on his administration’s torture policies. “The first thing you do,” he explained to members of the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan, “is ask, What’s legal? What do the lawyers say is possible? I made the decision, within the law, to get information so I [could] say to myself, I’ve done what it takes to do my duty to protect the American people.”

What was possible? Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo informed the president in a memo that physical abuse was not torture unless it generated the intensity of pain associated with “organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Impossibly, Yoo got this medical description from a completely unrelated federal statute that regulated Medicare benefits—and then pretended that this was how the irrelevant statute defined “severe pain.” (U.S. law partly defines torture as inflicting “severe pain.” See Gary Kamiya’s excellent evisceration of Yoo’s memo.)

Psychological methods, Yoo went on, were illegal only if they inflicted harm that endured for “months, or even years.” That was the official position of the Bush Administration until shortly before he left office, and it offered spurious legal cover for Omar Khadr’s torturers, who were very good at inflicting psychological harm that would last for years.

Part IV.

One of the chief mental defenses against harsh imprisonment is durable perspective; sanity requires a steady identity. But identity in adolescence is precarious by nature: Teenagers change their identities and beliefs all the time, and they cannot develop a secure perspective in the isolation of captivity. To figure out the world, teenagers have to be in it. For adolescents like Omar Khadr, who have already experienced radical trauma, the characteristic symptoms of months or years of barbarous confinement—paranoid delusions, suicidal tendencies, hallucinatory psychoses—can become irreversible.

Soon after Omar arrived at Guantanamo, he began exhibiting the kinds of disassociative symptoms most adolescent psychiatrists would have expected. He was startled to the point of disorientation by small changes in his surroundings. He had fainting spells. He cried frequently. When he heard gunshots at Camp Delta, he had a vision of helicopter gunships descending on him, as had happened during the gun battle in Afghanistan. These kinds of enclosing flashbacks came repeatedly. He had recurrent nightmares, often concerning the death of his father or his capture during the firefight, in which he felt, with phenomenal versimilitude, bullets piercing his chest.

His appetite diminished; he took on the appearance of the permanently malnourished. He entered what clinicians call a state of hypervigilance: He started thinking he might be attacked at any time—without reason, his heart rate would jump, and he would sweat and hyperventilate. He began hearing sounds—screams, bombs, things he could not identify—when the cellblock was silent. Every week or so, a self-generated rage possessed him. He screamed, he paced, he punched and threw things—an experience wholly foreign to his character. For long periods he felt no emotion at all. He started blaming himself for the things that had happened to him; he became deeply ashamed of what he had suffered in interrogation rooms. He developed a pronounced twich on the left side of his face, of which he remained unaware.

There were no conditions for release at Guantanamo—the Bush administration had suspended all the customary rules of judicial review and due process. Detainees had no way of knowing if anyone would ever get out. The human mind has tools for dealing with extreme physical and emotional stress, but it is not equipped to manage pugatorial limbo. In every POW camp in history there has been an easily imagined end-point: the end of the war. At Guantanamo, what detainee after detainee has said—and what study after study has shown—is that insanity and suicidal impulses inevitably accompany the kind of futurelessness Gitmo imposed on its inmates. The quantity of successful self-destruction among Guantanamo detainees, in circumstances so carefully designed to prevent it, indicated a suffusing despair unimaginable outside the gates of the base. Even if the detainees had all been released and received immediate psychological treatment, a great majority would have been—will be—psychologically impaired for the rest of their lives.

When Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, his future became a vacancy, and his imagination quickly lost the ability to fill it. He thought earnestly about killing himself. In January of 2003, only four months after he arrived, his guards were sufficiently worried about his suicidal disposition to confiscate his possessions. Madness was all around him. During the fall of 2004, Omar watched an Arab orthopedist named Ayman go insane. Over a period of months, Dr. Ayman became entirely mute, except for an occasional scream and a single question, asked of no one in particular: “Who is a woman here?”

The authorities at Guantanamo repeatedly refused to allow an independent medical evaluation of Khadr, so his lawyers [the Supreme Court had granted due process rights to detainees in early 2004] administered two exams to determine his mental status, and submitted the results to several experts. All concurred in their interpretations. Dr. Eric Trupin, one of the world’s foremost experts on the effects of incarceration on adolescents, concluded that Omar had been traumatized and tortured to a degree that was, in Trupin’s considerable experience, remarkable.

“The impact of these harsh interrogation techniques on an adolescent such as O.K., who also has been isolated for almost three years, is potentially catastrophic to his future development,” Trupin concluded. “Long-term consequences of harsh interrogation techniques are both more pronounced for adolescents and more difficult to remediate or treat even after such interrogations are discontinued, particularly if the victim is uncertain as to whether they will resume. It is my opinion, to a reasonable scientific certainty, that O.K.’s continued subjection to the threat of physical and mental abuse place him at significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration, which may include irreversible psychiatric symptoms and disorders, such as a psychosis with treatment-resistant hallucinations, paranoid delusions and persistent self-harming attempts.”

[Next: The last installment. If he is released, will Omar Khadr be able to recover?]

Prisoner transfer at Guantanamo Bay

Two Bush-Cheney torture program developments since the last post. One, Democratic senators have said they are open to the possibility of releasing Guantanamo’s Uighur detainees. That’s swell, since the Uighurs never had anything to do with Al Qaeda. They are Muslim traders from Xinjiang Province, in northwestern China. They arrived in Afghanistan with cheap leather goods to sell, having first passed through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzystan, and Tajikistan.

In my Rolling Stone article on Omar Khadr, I explained how this could have happened. Some background: Khadr’s brother, Abdurahman, who was also captured near bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan, later became an informant for the CIA, and for a few months posed as a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay. (He was never housed with Omar.)

During the course of their research, [Khadr’s lawyers] learned that the CIA had pulled Abdurahman out of Guantanamo … because so few detainees knew anything about Al Qaeda or the Taliban … Abdurahman told his CIA handlers how utterly the United States had failed, in its military sweeps in Afghanistan, to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. The U.S. offered cash rewards for suspected Al Qaeda members that were sometimes equivalent to several years of local wages. The American military thus made every Arab-looking person in Afghanistan vulnerable to opportunists. Criminal gangs rounded people up and brought them en masse to American authorities. Others were turned in to settle grudges, or because they had once associated with someone from Al Qaeda. U.S. intelligence apparently took criminals and mercenaries and underpaid soldiers at their word … Abdurahman Khadr concluded that only ten percent of the detainees at Guantanamo “are really dangerous.” The rest, he said, “are people that don’t have anything to do with it.” He told the story of an innocent detainee turned in by his own son for $5,000 … When the government recently prepared Summaries of Evidence for every one of its 517 detainees in an attempt to justify its “enemy combatant” designation, only eight percent were “definitively identified” as Al Qaeda fighters. Sixty-six percent have no definitive connection to Al Qaeda at all. The detention camps of Guantanamo Bay are filled with shepherds, taxi drivers, farmers, small businessmen, drug addicts, homeless people, and children.

(Andrew Sullivan was all over this story at the time; his trenchant commentary spoke for many of us.)

Also, the Daily Telegraph (UK) is reporting that the unreleased Abu Ghraib torture photos include scenes of rape—many different kinds of rape. (The source is apparently a former U.S. general.) Abu Ghraib is, of course, a direct descendent of Guantanamo. General Geoffrey Miller, overseer of “enhanced interrogations” at Guantanamo Bay, was later sent to Abu Ghraib to “Gitmo-ize” it. As I wrote in Rolling Stone, Omar Khadr had the misfortune of being at Guantanamo when Miller arrived:

[Khadr’s] statements [about torture practices] correlate exactly with the methods President Bush commissioned from General Miller. From the endlessly corroborated statement of [Khadr’s fellow detainee] Shafiq Rasul: “[Things changed] after General Miller. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked … moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. People would be kept [in isolation] for months and months and months. We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated before General Miller came.”

Part III

On March 31st, 2003, Omar Khadr’s security level was downgraded to “Level Four, with isolation.” Everything in his cell was taken, and he spent a month without human contact in a windowless box kept at the approximate temperature of a refrigerator.

When he was not being tortured or held in isolation, Omar spent virtually every waking minute of his captivity alone in his cell, first in a facility called Camp Delta and then in one called Camp V. His left eye, injured in the gun battle in Afghanistan, had gone blind and become immobile. Except for a Koran, there was nothing in his cells to occupy his mind. During his first year and a half at Guantanamo, Omar was permitted to exercise only twice a week for fifteen minutes, in a cage slightly larger than his own. Conversation between cells was possible, but prisoners had become so unstable and fearful of one another that they tended not to say much; there were no friendships. Omar tried to talk to his guards, about anything, but they were unresponsive. They often covered their nameplates with tape before entering detention facilities.

As Guantanamo was imposing heavy stagnation on Omar Khadr, it was also instilling in him an abiding sense of vulnerability and disequilibrium. The call to prayer was usually played five times a day, but sometimes it stopped, or changed. Exercise could come at any time of the day or night. If the guards woke you at 3:30 a.m. and you didn’t present yourself quickly enough to please them, you didn’t get to exercise. The timing and character of interrogations followed no pattern. Sometimes prisoners were woken up and moved from cell to cell for half the night for no apparent reason, a tactic so common it became known among guards as “the frequent-flier program.”

Meal portions were usually small enough to keep the prisoners in a state of low-grade hunger. Several times Omar found powder or partially dissolved tablets in the plastic glass he got with his food. The drugs produced dizziness, sleepiness or hyper-alertness. Tasteless and invisible, they were not detectable beforehand. Omar was never told what they were or why he had been drugged.

Once, when he was being transferred, Omar learned that his brother Abdurahman was in an adjacent prison yard. Abdurahman, forced by the CIA to choose between life imprisonment and cooperation, had chosen the latter. Omar had no idea that his brother was in Guantanamo to spy on detainees.

“How are you? How are you?” Abdurahman yelled, in Arabic.

According to Abdurahman, Omar told him to stick to the story the family had agreed upon—the Khadrs did charity work, and knew nothing of Al Qaeda.

“But how is your health?” Abdurahman yelled.

“It’s OK,” Omar yelled back. “I’m just losing my left eye and all. They don’t want to operate on it.”

It was the only time they encountered one another. Guards and interrogators continually reminded Omar that no one in the world knew where he was. No one would know if they decided to kill him. He was frequently threatened with physical harm and sudden execution. He heard gunshots. He heard the sounds other prisoners made when they were dragged back from interrogation rooms. Around the time of Omar’s arrival, detainees watched as guards rushed into the cell of a prisoner named Jumah Al-Dousari. As a detainee later described it:

[The first guard] ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah’s back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight, which must have been about 240 pounds … The others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah … [One] was kicking his stomach. Jumah had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation … [A guard] grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He smashed [his face] into the concrete floor. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood.

It was the kind of beating Omar witnessed regularly.

In July 2004, when Omar was seventeen, he was moved to Camp V. In his new cell, the fluorescent ceiling lights stayed on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes he went for weeks without seeing daylight. The temperature of the cell hovered around fifty eight degrees. Omar spent a lot of his time trying to stay warm: balling himself up, covering his extremities to the extent it was possible, making the best use of his blanket and mattress pad when they hadn’t been confiscated. His metal cot was a problem: It briskly gave away his body heat.

After a day in his Camp V cell, Omar had nothing new to see, touch, taste, hear or smell. He was accompanied only by his ow disordered thoughts. He tried to sleep the time away, but the cold was inimical to sleep, and the incessant lighting had divested him of his feel for night and day. Over the course of any given month, Omar did not know whether he would get to see the sun, have a conversation with another human being, or be allowed to wear clothes. For the past four years, Guantanamo has held him dead-still in the vacuum of his cell without ever allowing him to come to rest. The institution has made it clear to him that this will remain, for untold years, the form of his life.

[Next: Omar Khadr’s mental health unravels.]

Detainees at Camp X-Ray

So we learned from President Obama’s big speech that he will place Omar Khadr in one of five legal categories. Khadr probably won’t face Obama’s fantastically oxymoronic “lawful … prolonged detention” (Category 5). He has not been ordered released by a federal court (Category 3). He can’t be said to have violated any “American criminal law” (Category 1), which would qualify him for trial in federal court. Military prosecutors claim that he has violated “laws of war” (Category 2), in which case he would be tried “through [a] military commission.” Obama doesn’t use the word “tribunal” because of its star-chamber connotations and because “commissions” have wartime precedent in America, but these are clearly Bush’s totalitarian tribunals. According to military defense attorneys, Obama’s reforms amount to feather-dusting.

Khadr must hope that the government deems him “safely transferable” to another country (Category 4). He is a Canadian citizen; his country’s highest court has demanded his repatriation. If Obama’s lovely words about the rule of law—about “enlist[ing] the power of our most fundamental values,” values that project “a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity”—have any meaning, Khadr will be sent back to Canada with a recommendation that he be reintegrated into society.

Meanwhile, in a rebuttal to Obama, chief “enhanced interrogation” engineer Dick Cheney uttered words that, in their glib torturing of reality, induce speechlessness:

The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work … It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation … The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently.

Part II

The design of Omar Khadr’s life at Guantanamo began as a theory in the minds of Air Force researchers. After the Korean War, the Air Force created a program called SERE—Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape—to help captured pilots to resist the interrogation techniques of the Chinese, which were developed to generate propaganda. SERE’s founders wanted to know precisely how this kind of torture eroded the human psyche, so that they could train pilots to withstand it. The answer turned out to have two components: pain and harm delivered in utterly unpredictable, sometimes illusory environments—an absolute denial of physical comfort and spacial-temporal orientation; and a removal of the inner comfort of identity—“personality disruption,” achieved by humiliating people and coercing them to commit offenses against their own religion, dignity and morality, until they become unrecognizable to and ashamed of themselves.

SERE scientists imitated a variety of totalitarian stress-torture techniques: sleep deprivation, temporary starvation, sound overexposure, waterboarding, sexual mortification, religious desecration. SERE methods were to be administered only in small inoculating doses to American military personnel. The soldiers would consequently develop a degree of resistance, and be less likely to produce propaganda for the enemy.

At Guantanamo, however, at the request of Bush administration officials, these techniques were reconverted and expanded on by the military and CIA. The techniques were used in concert and continuously—coercive interrogation as life experience. To be held at Guantanamo Bay was, per se, to be tortured. Psychologists there, including at least one SERE psychologist, might manage every aspect of a detainee’s life. In one case, a psychiatrist reportedly told guards to limit a detainee to seven squares of toilet paper a day.

While he was at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr was beaten to the head, nearly suffocated, threatened with having his clothes taken indefinitely, and lunged at by attack dogs while wearing a bag over his head. “Your life is in my hands,” an intelligence officer told him during an interrogation in the spring of 2003.

During the questioning, Omar gave an answer the interrogator did not like. The man spat in his face and threatened to send him to Israel, Egypt, Jordan or Syria—places where they tortured people the old-fashioned way: very slowly, analytically removing body parts. The Egyptians, the interrogator told Omar, would hand him to Askri raqm tisa—Soldier Number Nine. Soldier Number Nine, the interrogator explained, was a guard who specialized in raping prisoners.

Omar’s chair was removed. Because his hands and ankles were shackled, he fell to the floor. His interrogator told him to get up. Standing up was hard, because he could not use his hands. When he did, his interrogator told him to sit down again. When he sat, the interrogator told him to stand again. He refused. The interrogator called two guards into the room, who grabbed Omar by the neck and arms, lifted him into the air, and dropped him onto the floor. The interrogator told them to do it again. He told them to do it again, and again, and again. Then he said he was locking Omar’s case file in a safe: Omar would spend the rest of his life in a cell at Guantanamo Bay.

Several weeks later, a man who claimed to be Afghani interrogated Omar. He wore an American flag on his uniform pants. He said his name was “Izmarai”—lion—and that he was from Wardeq. He spoke in Farsi, and occasionally Pashto and English. Izmarai said a new prison was under construction in Afghanistan for uncooperative detainees. “In Afghanistan,” Izmarai said, “they like small boys.” He pulled out a photograph of Omar and wrote on it, in Pashto, “This detainee must be transferred to Bagram.”

Omar was taken from his chair and short-shackled to an eye-bolt in the floor, his hands behind his knees. He was left that way for six hours, during which time he soiled himself and guards and intelligence officers came in and laughed at him.

(Next: Khadr’s security status is downgraded.)

"Detainees in vicinity - maintain silence"

As revelations about the Bush administration’s torture policies accrue more quickly than they can be spun, Democrats fight over funding to close Guantanamo Bay, and President Obama defends his problematic positions at the National Archives, it’s worth considering not just how unrestrainedly sadistic the interrogation practices there were, but also how grievously enduring the psychological wounds they inflicted have been. Sustained Bush-Cheney torture has done emotional damage to detainees that will long outlast current investigations and prosecutions.

In 2006, I profiled the teenage detainee Omar Khadr for Rolling Stone. Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was fifteen years old, after a gun battle between U.S. troops and the Taliban. Canadian-born, he had gone to Afghanistan with his jihadist father to live in Osama bin Laden’s compound.

The government accuses Khadr of killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade during the battle, but in 2008 the Pentagon accidentally revealed that it had no evidence of this; it had evidence only that Khadr was present at the time. Khadr was far too young to have any useful knowledge of al Qaeda activities. Still, at Bagram Air Base and then at Guantanamo, he was treated as a dangerous, savvy enemy combatant.

Khadr’s two tribunal hearings—the first beginning in 2005, the second in 2007—have revealed the prosecution’s case to be a sham, and its actions patently illegal. The proceedings have stalled. This despite the illegal leak of a classified videotape found after the gun battle, showing a fourteen-year-old Khadr and other child soldiers laying landmines. The videotape was very likely leaked by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

In the spring of 2008, Canadian Foreign Affairs officials visited Khadr, determined that he was “salvageable,” and raised the possibility of his repatriation. A prominent imam in Toronto offered to create a “religious rehabilitation” program for him, but the Canadian government has refused to request Khadr’s extradition or repatriation, despite petitions by the Canadian Bar Association, Amnesty International, and UNICEF, as well as a ruling last month by the Federal Court of Canada requiring it to do so immediately, in accordance with international law.

Khadr is Gitmo’s youngest prisoner, and he is now the only Western citizen still there. He has spent the entirety of the vulnerable, transformative period between adolescence and adulthood in its cellblocks and interrogation chambers.

Part I

Before he was transported from Bagram to Guantanamo, Omar Khadr was dressed in an orange polyester uniform and hog-chained: shackled hand and foot, a waist chain cinching his hands to his stomach, another chain connecting the shackles on his hands to those on his feet. At both wrist and ankle, the shackles bit. The cuffs permanently scarred many prisoners on the flight, causing them to lose feeling in their limbs for several days or weeks afterwards. Hooded and kneeling on the tarmac with the other prisoners, Omar waited for many hours. His knees sent intensifying pain into his body and then went numb.

Guards finally arrived and prodded Omar into the cargo bay of a C-130 transport. They pulled black thermal mittens onto his hands and taped them hard at the wrists. They pulled opaque goggles over his eyes and placed soundproof earphones over his ears. They put a deodorizing mask over his mouth and nose. They bolted him, fully trussed, to a backless bench. Whichever limbs hadn’t already lost sensation from the cuffs lost sensation from the high-altitude cold during the flight, which took fifteen hours. “I wished to God that one of these MPs would go crazy and then shoot me,” one detainee who took the trip said later. “It was the only time in my life that I really wished for a bullet.”

At Guantamano, after crossing the bay on a ferry, Omar was taken, in his sensory-deprivation suit, to a base hospital. “Welcome to Israel,” someone told him. His arrival in October of 2002 coincided with a crucial juncture in the War on Terror: That same month, President Bush, in violation of international law, had authorized military officials at the detention center to begin employing a host of brutal interrogation techniques. Before Omar Khadr could even begin to assimilate the wondrous horrors of his new surroundings, his captors began to torture him.

A few months after Omar Khadr arrived at Guantanamo, he was awakened by a guard around midnight. “Get up,” the guard said. “You have a reservation.” Reservation was the commonly used term at Gitmo for torture session.

In the interrogation room, Omar’s interviewer grew displeased with his level of cooperation. He summoned several MPs, who chained Khadr tightly to an eye-bolt in the center of the floor. Omar’s hands and feet were shackled together; the eye-bolt held him at the point where his hands and feet met. Fetally positioned, he was left alone for about a half hour.

Upon their return, the MPs uncuffed Omar’s arms, pulled them behind his back, and recuffed them to his legs, straining them badly at their sockets. At the junction of his arms and legs he was again bolted to the floor and left alone. The degree of pain a human body experiences in this from of “stress positioning” can quickly lead to delirium, and ultimately to unconsciousness. Before that happened, the MPs returned, forced Omar onto his knees, and cuffed his wrists and ankles together behind his back. This made his body into a kind of bow, his torso convex and rigid, right at the limit of its flexibility. The force of his cuffed wrists straining upward against his cuffed ankles drove his kneecaps into the concrete floor. The guards left.

An hour or two later they came back, checked the tautness of the chains between his hands and feet, and pushed him over onto his stomach. Transfixed in his bonds, Omar toppled like a figurine. Again they left. Many hours had passed since Omar had been taken from his cell. He urinated on himself and onto the floor. The MPs returned, mocked him for a while, and then poured pine oil solvent all over his body. Without altering his chains, they began dragging him by his feet through the mixture of urine and pine oil. Because his body had been so tightened, the new motion racked it. The MPs swung him around and around, the piss and solvent washing up into his face. The idea was to use him as a human mop. When the MPs felt they had sucessfully pretended to soak up the liquid with his body, they uncuffed him and carried him back to his cell. He was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

(Next: The torturers’ philosophy.)

HMS Bounty mutineers setting Captain Bligh adrift

Some islanders—most vociferously some of the women—have painted a defiant picture of a culture where under-age sex has been a natural, even fun, part of growing up for more than 200 years.  – The Press (Auckland), October, 27, 2004

Pitcairn Island mayor Steve Christian is accused of leading “the boys,” a group of seven men who allegedly spent 30 years sexually abusing underage girls on the tiny Pacific outcrop.  – The Australian (Sydney), September 30, 2004

In 1789, in Tahiti’s Matavai Bay, the Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian cut his anchor cable and directed his stolen ship towards a group of islands that existed, as far as he knew, only in nautical anecdote. With him were eight fellow mutineers and their Tahitian wives and servants, some of whom had probably been forced aboard. Christian never found the islands he sought, but he eventually happened upon a miniscule, harborless, uninhabited island called Pitcairn. It was the most remote in the world. It had been seen only once before, by the captain and crew of a distant ship. The island had vanished from their telescopic view almost as soon as it had appeared, and the captain mischarted it. Fletcher Christian took a brief tour of the island, and was satisfied. He drove the Bounty into a creek and set it on fire.

Pitcairn’s interior had fruit and fertile soil and fresh water, and the mutineers found plenty of birds and fish. They built thatched houses with gardens. They began treating the Tahitian men as slaves. The women bore their children. The Tahitian men rebelled and killed eight of the mutineers. The women killed the Tahitian men in revenge. Pitcairn was left with one mutineer, Alexander Smith, and many women and children.

Nearly twenty years passed before other ships sighted Pitcairn. The islanders, gracious and speaking a hybrid of Tahitian and eighteen-century Royal Navy English, hailed the ships from longboats. On the island’s central plateau, according to one report, neat thatched houses and tilled fields were laid out geometrically around a lawn that resembled an English village green. Alexander Smith and Fletcher Christian’s son, Thursday October, had become the island’s authorities. Their houses had shutters and feather beds. The women were bare-breasted beneath decorative bark-cloth shawls. The Lord’s Prayer was said before meals. The story of the mutineers created a sensation in England for a while in the early nineteenth century, and then, for the next century and a half, Pitcairn largely disappeared from the world’s consciousness.

Forty-eight people currently live on Pitcairn. The residents are named for the mutineers: Christian, Smith, Warren, Brown, Young. Halfway between New Zealand and Peru, Pitcairn is a 36-hour open-sea boat trip away from the closest airport, on the island of Mangareva. There is almost no regular transportation to Pitcairn. Rare passing ships, unable to dock, pause off the coast while the islanders, if the sea permits, row out in longboats to ferry people and supplies ashore.

In 1996, a British missionary returned to London from Pitcairn and lodged a complaint that his preteen daughter had been seduced by a local man. British territorial authorities began an investigation. Pitcairnese men, they discovered, routinely had sex with pubescent girls. According to some islanders, both male and female, this custom is consensual, part of a traditional initiation into adulthood. In recent decades, though, a population decline and radical concentration of power seem to have grossly corrupted the practice. In 2004, ten men—half of Pitcairn’s adult male population—were charged with a roster of sex crimes, including child rape and indecent assault.

Social life on Pitcairn is ordered by a caste system in which two paradoxical criteria confer status: Polynesian appearance and directness of descent from Fletcher Christian. Steve Christian, the prime offender, is Fletcher Christian’s closest living relative. He looks Polynesian. His capacious hilltop house is called Big Fence. Before his arrest, he was the island’s mayor, radiographer, dentist (he mainly extracted teeth), and chief engineer. He captained Pitcairn’s longboat fleet. His son and co-defendant, Randy, was chairman of the “Internal Committee,” which administers all public works projects and distributes the island’s few government jobs.

A week or so into their trial, Steve and Randy went shopping at Pitcairn’s small store. They were voluble, cracking jokes and talking with customers. Two women who had testified against them, and then recanted, came in and started chatting with one of the store’s cashiers, Steve Christian’s daughter. It was a common kind of scene: Avoidance is impossible on Pitcairn, and no one is exempt from societal demands. A twelve-year-old girl who has sex with an adult is doing what her mother did; she can expect her father to have sex with other young girls, and she can expect her brother, eventually, to do the same.

During the trial, for which lawyers and reporters and a New Zealand judge traveled to the island, a group of Pitcairnese women held a public meeting to declare the innocence of the accused men. They said nonconsensual sex played no part in island life, and that they themselves had welcomed sex at the cusp of adolescence. “I was 13 and I thought I was hot,” one woman told a reporter from The Australian. “I felt like a big lady.” The men had only been with girls who were “hot for it,” another woman said.

This was the essence of the men’s defense. After testifying that Randy Christian had raped her when she was ten years old, one young woman admitted under cross examination that she had subsequently developed a crush on him and written him love letters. But even as she was writing them she was fending off his attempts to assault her.

The prosecution’s testimony was flatly horrific: a young girl gagged, held down, and raped by two men; another forced to perform oral sex on a man during a communal outing. Witnesses said the abuse had been routine for years, that Steve Christian had reserved for himself the privilege of “breaking in” 12-year-old girls, and that lower-caste men, in response, had sought out ever-younger girls for themselves.

Some of the victims remained protective of their community, and by extension of the accused. They didn’t want the men to face the humiliation of jail, and they knew that Pitcairn could not afford to lose able-bodied adults for long. They wanted, instead, confessions, repentance, and a commitment to reform Pitcairnese society. Whether those hopes were at all realistic will now be determined: Although nine of the ten accused men were convicted, their sentences were short, and all but one have returned to the island.

Sources: The Independent (London); The New York Times; The Press (Auckland); The Herald (Glasgow); The Mercury (Hobart); The Australian (Sydney); and the 2003 book The Bounty, by Caroline Alexander.

(I haven’t read it, but a reporter for The Independent, Kathy Marks, has just published a book on Pitcairn, Paradise Lost.)