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.)

Glacier in Vatnajoekull National Park

A lagoon called Jokulsarlon, in eastern Iceland, is now informally known to glaciologists as the place where glaciers go to die. Iceland’s highest mountain, Oraefajokull, overlooks Jokulsarlon. Oraefajokull is covered by the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajokull (“Glacier of Rivers,” now long-softening). The glacier moves down the mountainside and enters a tidal lake, where it cracks into gigantesque iceburgs, which roll tremendously into the water, bob hugely across its surface for several miles, and then accelerate somewhat diminished into a river that empties into Jokulsarlon. Smacked and warmed by surf as the river indecorously hurries them into the lagoon, the icebergs fracture into pieces and dissolve. You can stand there and watch as the level of the global sea rises.

The beaches of Jokulsarlon are marked everywhere by bits of iceberg, or bits of Vatnajokull, because incoming tides push them temporarily back out of the lagoon and onto the shore. Some are like boulders; some are like pendants. There are fields of them running down the beaches, glinting extensively in moonlight, starlight, and sunlight. As they melt, they release ancient air molecules and ancient water molecules, pressed into stillness six or eight or a thousand or more years ago, when sedimentary snowfalls were building the glacier. These molecules were last abroad when the Maya were building Chichen Itza, the Romani were leaving India for Europe, China was experiencing a Confucian renaissance, Malagasy hunters in Madagascar were exterminating lemurs the size of bears, the Berber king Abu-Bakr was founding Marrakech, and the Vikings were settling Iceland. Some of the molecules were around when Erik the Red set sail from one of Iceland’s young ports on a journey that would end in the discovery of Greenland.

Arctic ice is melting so fast these days that if you were to climb to the top of Greenland’s glaciers in the warmer months, up to the mile-high plateaus, you would see lakes by the thousands: lakes to the horizon. They form when percolating meltwater collects in depressions in the glacial bed, and they have surfaces of several square miles and depths of thirty or forty feet. Anywhere else on the earth these meltwater lakes would be lifestyle-altering topographical features, but up on Greenland’s glaciers they form overnight and disappear in hours: they are little flashes, flourishes of the ice sheet.

Meltwater also turns into rivers, which can converge to make lakes; lakes can conversely spawn rivers. It all depends on what melts when, where. As meltwater rivers cut into the mile-thick ice, they fashion slot canyons and crested buttes and needle spires and fantail overhangs—most of the basic erosion patterns you see in Monument Valley and the Badlands and Canyon de Chelly and the Grand Canyon. The thin serpentine rivers at the very bottom of those hot canyonlands are cloacal and slow; on the glacier, they’re clear blue and fast. Glacial hydrology is not expressed in red and brown and orange and grey; it’s expressed in bright white. Landscapes that are hundreds of millions of years old, landscapes people travel a thousand miles to see, are created on Greenland’s glaciers in seasons, or less. They’re almost as big (Greenland’s glaciers have calved icebergs the size of Yosemite’s El Capitan).

When the rivers find cracks in the ice and bore down into it, their supplying lakes usually follow very quickly. Sometimes icequakes open up a crack in the lake bed and the mass of water crafts the deepest part of the crack into a round-rimmed cylindrical conduit, like a cenote in limestone, and empties itself almost entirely in an hour and a half. It’s a three-thousand-foot drop. At the outset, the force of the downrush is equivalent to the force of water going over Niagara Falls.

Once most of the water is gone, and only cataract trickles remain, you can use climbing ropes to lower yourself into the hole. That’s about as far from the temperate, habitable world as a person can get (and still live). You’re pretty far even from lagoons like Jokulsarlon, to which you are at least connected by globally warmed glacial plumbing. The best way to appreciate your remoteness is not to note the residual waterfalls or thickness of the glacier or fathomless, darkening, frozen cylinder you’re in, but the color all around you. At a certain shallow depth, the hole is illuminated exclusively by sunlight obliquely passing through the ice sheet. The ice absorbs every color in the rainbow except one, a particular incandescent marine blue, a color you can’t see anywhere else on earth.

Sources: NPR: James Balog on Fresh Air, Extreme Ice Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Science Daily, Nova

According to AFP, between August of 2008 and last week, 37 U.S. drone attacks killed 360 people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The pilots who operate the drones that kill insurgents along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border commute to work from subdivisions in southeastern Nevada. They might sit down to breakfast with their families before going to war; they might take their kids to school, discussing Hannah Montana or bullies or Twilight or multiplication tables on the way. The pilots have offices in air-conditioned single-wide trailers on Nellis or Creech Air Force bases. Their shifts are twelve hours long. The incongruity between the pilots’ quotidian lives and their sensory and psychic transportation to combat zones 7,500 miles away is so vertiginously stark that some drone squadron commanders use tricks to keep the realities from mingling: they make their pilots wear flight suits and impose a communications blackout during missions.

At the beginning of their shifts, in front of screens, in their specially outfitted trailers, the drone pilots watch their robot planes take off, mainly from Afghan airbases. The drones—the Predator or the Reaper—continuously transmit live video: pilots will see the granular details of local topography and geology; they will see not just villages and social gatherings but faces, expressions. As the drones fly over tribal areas in, say, Waziristan or the Northwest Frontier Province, the pilots may see terrain that no American has seen before. They should be able to precisely end human life there: the drones’ laser-guided hellfire missiles can reportedly kill groups of people chatting in the street without damaging surrounding buildings.

Drones fly several kinds of missions. A lone pair may be charged with finding and killing individual insurgents. Some drones linger for consecutive days over a certain area to discern “pattern of life” that will expedite future kills. (The pilot or pilots who document the pattern may themselves kill the people who have lived according to it.) Drones also fly in support of infantry soldiers who are tracking down and engaging insurgents. Then the polarities of experience become impossible to assimilate. The soldiers are there, in mortal danger, holding their own guns. The drone pilots are specters, not even inferable from their actions. For them, the sun is in the wrong place.

During hostilities, pilots or their commanders speak in real time to senior officials and international-law specialists at command centers around the world. Authorization to strike can be obtained in several minutes or less. This hierarchy is known as the “kill chain,” and in the last decade it has been drastically shortened (during the first Gulf War, authorization often took hours).

After drone pilots engage the enemy—after they “put a missile on a target”—their aircraft do something that is historically odd: they hover, inertly. Manned fighter planes make a lethal pass or two and then turn around; ground troops kill the enemy and secure territory or engage and retreat. Drones just stay there, aloft: their streaming images remain valuable.

The virtual pilots, meanwhile, stay seated in the conditioned air of their Nevada trailers, observing people and buildings and cars exploding and burning. They may see their victims disintegrate, bleed, burn, writhe, die. The military says that hellfire missiles fired by drones cause very few civilian casualties, but it happens: drone pilots may watch their missiles kill children. They may also see U.S. soldiers getting hurt or dying. They can’t help; they can’t turn away. The action in their offices is internal: chemical changes in bloodstreams, elements of future nightmares collecting themselves.

After combat, fighter pilots and infantry soldiers go back to their bases. They remain in the region of the killing, surrounded by the people who have done it with them. Drone operators close the trailer door and drive home.

“You see Americans killed in front of your eyes,” a drone pilot recently told the author P.W. Singer, “and then you have to go to a PTA meeting.” “You are going to war for 12 hours,” another pilot told Singer, “shooting weapons at targets, directing kills on enemy combatants, and then you get in the car, drive home, and within twenty minutes you are sitting at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.”

Air Force commanders have said that it is harder, psychologically, to lead a squadron of drone operators fighting remotely than to lead a squadron of fighter pilots in a theater of war. Combat at a 7,000-mile remove reportedly results in more PTSD than fighting on the ground. Some commanders have asked chaplains, psychologists, and psychiatrists to counsel drone pilots. But the pilots don’t get enough help, at least in part because, despite the Bronze Stars they earn, they feel unentitled to it.

Sources: P.W. Singer: Wired for War, The Wilson Quarterly, interviews on ABC and Democracy Now; The New York Times; Prospect Magazine; Air America; Infoweek