No fairytales allowed

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has 36 clients in Guantánamo and has visited many times. In this powerful extract from a new book he argues that secrecy in the camp is a disease

Saturday April 21, 2007
The Guardian

I had visited several times and there was something nagging at me. I could not work out what left me uniquely unsettled about the place. It was not the depressing environment; few prisons are inspirational. It was not the occasional intimidation. Eventually it came to me: I could not remember being lied to so often and so consistently. In Guantánamo, lying was a disease that had reached pandemic proportions.

Former "detainee" Binyam Mohamed [British resident arrested in Pakistan] viewed the whole military commission process as a con, a lie that was meant to deceive the world. In June 2006 the supreme court said the same, in more temperate terms, and struck down the commissions as illegal. It rejected Donald Rumsfeld's assurance that the trials would be fair, accusing the administration of "jettisoning" legal rights.

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In Guantánamo, the military began with smaller lies and worked upwards. I was visiting Camp Echo one day and they had messed up the visitation schedule. The client I was meant to see was not there, although I had sent the schedule for my visits several weeks before. I thought I might as well go ahead and see Shaker Aamer [British resident captured in Afghanistan], whom I was not meant to meet until later in the week. So I asked the SOG (the sergeant of the guard, in charge of the camp) whether Shaker was in his normal cell. "No, he's not here," the SOG replied. I settled down for another wasted hour, waiting for the military to bring over someone I could see. It was hot even under the umbrella at the "picnic table" - the area behind one of the cells in Camp Echo where they made lawyers wait. I watched a lizard crawling up the green mesh on the wire fence. I thought about the spider in Robert the Bruce's cave, continually battling to spin its web and teaching patience to the early Scottish nationalists.

The next day I saw Shaker. "Were you here yesterday?" I asked. "Yeah, of course. I've been here for weeks," he replied. So why did the SOG lie to me? He could have said, "Sorry, sir. I am not permitted to speak about that," or "Yes, sir, he is here, but I am afraid we cannot deviate from the schedule." Instead he looked me in the eye and lied. It was unsettling. He had seemed a clean-cut, well-mannered sort of person.

The dissembling disease got worse as time passed. First there was the effort to suppress the truth, with censorship or silence rather than any overt falsehood. Then there was the lie by semantics, where the US military redefined the language to provide plausible deniability. Finally, there was the bare-faced lie. This kind of culture does not germinate in a vacuum. Rumsfeld is responsible for a reconstitution of the English language. I set about compiling a glossary of the Gitmo-speak. The language was so deceptive that I found it appalling and amusing in equal measure.

In a December 2004 press conference, the US navy secretary Gordon England tried to defend conditions in Guantánamo by producing the novel argument that the camp was rehabilitative: "People have learned to read and have learned to write, and so it's not just being incarcerated. We do try to get people prepared for a better life." Prisoners had some difficulty exercising their new-found abilities. Indeed, contrary to England's statement, prisoners in Guantánamo were certainly not considered "people" and the guards were not even allowed to call them "prisoners". One of the escorts told me that, on pain of punishment, soldiers are required to call them "detainees". He wouldn't even say the word "prisoner" out loud. The Pentagon had come to the conclusion that it sounds better for us to "detain" someone for several years, given that he has not been offered a trial. Naturally I set about avoiding the word "detainee".

Meanwhile the authorities exercised rigid control over any information that the prisoners received. Each time I went to visit, I would take a suitcase full of reading materials. I maintained a log reflecting the fate of each publication. Magazines awarded the stamp DENIED included National Geographic, Scientific American and Runner's World. On one occasion it seemed justified, since that month's National Geographic had a story about building an atomic bomb, but the editions about whales and African tribes hardly seemed a threat to national security. One soldier explained the censorship of Scientific American to me: the prisoner might learn about some hi-tech weapons system. Banning Runner's World was less obvious, given the naval base was surrounded on one side by a Cuban minefield and on the other three by ocean.

I was surprised - and Shaker Aamer was incensed - that they would not let in The African-American Slave by Frederick Douglass. Uncle Tom's Cabin was also barred. I dropped off an anthology of first world war poetry for Omar Deghayes that included Wilfred Owen's poem Futility, about the ghastly violence of war. It was returned DENIED.

Omar was born in 1969 and was a British refugee from Libya. His father was tortured and killed by Muammar Gadafy in 1980, and as a teenager Omar moved with his family to Brighton and studied law. He had not completed his law exams, so I brought his books so he could study, ready for his release. Law books, though, were not permitted, least of all a subversive tome about the legal rights of prisoners.

The Save Omar campaign auctioned off an autographed copy of John Pilger's book Hidden Agendas to raise funds. The highest bidder donated it back, so I could try to get it in to Omar. It was written in 1998 and the index had no references to Islamic extremism. The most controversial statement I could see in the book was Pilger's comment that most of the victims of terrorism were Muslims. It never got through.

At this point British political authors began to vie for the status of having a book banned. The New Statesman editor John Kampfner gave me a signed copy of his book Blair's Wars for Omar. Clare Short signed a copy of An Honourable Deception? New Labour, Iraq and the Misuse of Power with a dedication: "Hope you will be back with us soon, Omar.". An inverted snobbery began to develop: if your book slipped through the censors, perhaps that would cast doubt on the credibility of your opinions. I worried that Jeremy Paxman would be disappointed that his book The English was allowed in.

The only Australian left in Guantánamo, David Hicks, was facing a military con-mission, like Binyam, and his lawyer was banned from giving him Scott Turow's legal thriller Presumed Innocent. The basis for censoring The New Dinkum Aussie Dictionary was less clear. Perhaps the strangest decision involved four books returned with the notation: "These Items were not Cleared for Delivery to the Detainee(s)." They were Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Beauty and the Beast - all in Arabic translation. As one FBI agent admonished me: "You know that Arabic script is full of squiggles, and it can easily hide messages to the prisoners." Could it be, I wondered, that Cinderella was secretly an enemy combatant? Eventually the military barred us from bringing books for our clients altogether. So much for education.

Next there was the senseless secrecy. Every word that my Guantánamo clients said to me was deemed classified and I had to get permission from censors to reveal it. To violate them would be a criminal offence and I could end up in jail. Whenever I met with a client I would take notes, but I could not take them with me when I left. I was obliged to put them into an envelope, seal them with SECRET stickers and give them to the military escort to mail to Washington. The notes went by normal mail, which seemed far from secure. Indeed, the first time I visited the military lost my notes for weeks.

This procedure prevented the lawyers from revealing the truth about Guantánamo for a long time after any visit. This meant that I would visit Guantánamo, fly back to England, then return to Washington three weeks later to review my own notes. Meanwhile I was forbidden from saying anything to anyone about what my clients had said. Once the notes arrived in Washington, I would get notice that I could come to the "secure facility" to review them and submit facts for classification review. Even today I cannot repeat some of what my clients told me, but nothing I learned in Guantánamo would be classified in a sane world. I never saw anything that was relevant to US national security, unless it would make the US less secure to admit the truth about torture committed by American personnel.

All this was to control the flow of bad news out of Guantánamo. From the beginning Joe Margulies, the other civilian lawyer working for Binyam Mohamed, encapsulated the proper response to this: if we could open up the prison to public inspection, the government would close it down. The awkward truth about what was happening there would outweigh any perceived benefit of keeping the prison open. Meanwhile, the government wrote the rules. The military censor was dogged in defence. It was not his fault; he was merely applying the rules and trying to do it as politely as possible when we met in the secret Washington facility.

In November 2004, I met Moazzam Begg in Camp Echo. Moazzam was from Birmingham, and we talked for hours and he poured out his desperate experiences. He impressed me from the beginning with his understated eloquence. He had been with his family in Afghanistan, working on a charitable project that involved schools and water wells. When he and his family fled the war to Pakistan, he became one of hundreds sold for bounties to the Americans. Later, he ended up in Guantánamo, tarred as a major terrorist.

When my notes got back to Washington, in January 2005, I wrote a 40-page memo about how Moazzam had been abused by the US military in Afghanistan. Every word was censored. The way the military had pretended to torture his wife in the next room, even information about American soldiers murdering two prisoners in front of Moazzam, was considered a "method of interrogation" that could not be revealed. I was not allowed to reveal how my clients' mental health was crumbling either. Moazzam had been tortured, then held in solitary confinement for 18 months; he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder; he had nightmares, flashbacks, all the symptoms. But this, the military said, was a privacy issue.

The effort to suppress this backfired. Had they come out immediately, the facts of Moazzam's abuse would have soon have slipped into obscurity. The cover-up ran and ran. I wrote one letter to Tony Blair which began with a title, Re: Torture and Abuse of British Citizens in Guantánamo Bay. The next two pages were the highlights of the torture committed against Moazzam and other British citizens. I put in a paragraph saying, "Anything that has been censored or blacked out in this letter, your close allies in the United States don't think you should be allowed to hear." I then attached the 40-page memo detailing Moazzam's abuse. What I got back from the censor was extraordinary. Every word about torture was declared to be classified, except the title, but the last sentence made it past the hovering black marker.

By now there were perhaps a dozen on our team of volunteer lawyers and each one was running into similar problems with the censorship regulations. We tried to press the issues systematically, and eventually the government was persuaded to relax the rules. At last we could get information out to prove how the clients had been mistreated, and the memos about Moazzam's mistreatment were cleared. Indeed, with the threat of this evidence of torture making it into the public eye, the pressure on the Bush administration increased, and at the end of January, Moazzam and the three British prisoners who remained in the prison (Feroz Abbasi, Richard Belmar and Martin Mubanga) were set free.

Moazzam and Feroz had been among the six prisoners originally charged in the military commissions, supposedly the very worst terrorists on the base. Their release, and the fact that the British government found no charges to bring against them, illustrated the extent of the US military's delusion.

Gaining trust

Gaining trust is not easy. When we won the right to visit the prisoners the military tried to outflank us. They began by sending in interrogators pretending to be lawyers. They said all the lawyers were Jewish, relying on perceived Muslim prejudices to drive a wedge.

The next gambit was arguably even sillier. "They have been saying ..." Usama Abu Kabir hesitates, not wanting to go on. "They say ... " By this time Usama is scarlet. He is a courteous man. "Well ... that you like having sex with men!" I want to say that it should make no difference to him. I can't afford to, as so many of my clients here have been brought up in conservative Islamic countries, and we don't have time for a debate. I have to wave my wedding ring about and issue a denial.

There are valid reasons for mistrust. What is to distinguish the lawyer from an interrogator after years of deception? To represent a prisoner here you must be an American citizen. "Hi! I'm from America and I'm here to help you." When a prisoner has a legal visit it is called a "reservation", the euphemism used for interrogation.

Some lawyers say the meetings are confidential. The prisoners laugh. Everyone knows that there are cameras in the cell and microphones by the door.

There are other problems. One saw a client for the first time with a translator whom the prisoner had previously seen working with US military intelligence.

· Extracted from Bad Men by Clive Stafford Smith, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson on April 26th priced £16.99.

· In tomorrow's Observer: read about the journalist interned at Guantánamo in another extract from Bad Men

What's Leaking Out of the White House

By Peter Baker

Sunday, April 8, 2007; B01

Shortly before leaving Moscow after four years covering Russia, I was granted a rare audience by a top Kremlin official. As we talked about Vladimir Putin and his relationship with President Bush, the Kremlin official compared the Bush team to the Bolsheviks and laughed at how secretive their White House appeared. "They've adopted some of our techniques with the press," he said.

For most of the past six years, journalists covering the White House have indeed been forced to master the art of Kremlinology. The famously disciplined and leak-averse Bush team succeeded at hermetically sealing the building, keeping behind-the-scenes machinations, well, behind the scenes. Deprived of any genuine information about how the institution operated, reporters were left to extrapolate what was really going on based on who was standing where at a Rose Garden photo op.

But something surprising has been happening in the past few months. The hermetic seal is showing cracks, and now the most disciplined administration in modern times has begun to see its internal workings seep into public view. Bush's shake-up of his Iraq team appeared in the newspapers before he was ready to announce it. His fight with the Joint Chiefs of Staff over plans to send more troops to Iraq played out on the front page for weeks. Secret memos by his national security adviser and his old defense secretary showed up in print. And unnamed officials put out word that Bush's new defense secretary tried unsuccessfully to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"You always have more leaks when you have a combination of a late term and big controversy," observed Marlin Fitzwater, the only person to serve as press secretary to two presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "Between the war and the last two years in office, I think it's pretty normal to have this kind of increase in leaked material. You've got to remember that the primary motivation for most leaks is that people want to influence the policy or the president when they're not otherwise able to do so. At the end of a term and in the middle of a controversy is when you can do that."

None of this means that the White House is suddenly leaking like a sieve. This is still not the most transparent institution; extracting information can be maddening at times. Just two months ago, as the Super Bowl neared, the White House refused to reveal what kind of television shows the president watches. And in fact, many disclosures that have come out lately seem to have originated from other agencies in the administration. But it signals that the White House is no longer able to enforce its will on all corners of government quite as efficiently as it once seemed to do.

"Discipline is enforced by fear, and there's not a lot of people right now afraid of the president, politically afraid," said Joe Lockhart, who was press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "The Joint Chiefs, the Republican leadership, former aides are not worried about political retribution from the White House. They're a paper tiger."

Indeed, the toughest criticism of the Bush White House these days seems to emanate from those who were once on the inside and are no longer reluctant to speak out. Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for Bush's 2004 reelection campaign, told the New York Times this month that he is "so disappointed in things" that he has concluded that Sen. John F. Kerry was right about Iraq. John R. Bolton left his post as Bush's ambassador to the United Nations and within weeks complained that the administration was not being tough enough on Iran and North Korea. Kenneth Adelman, a former confidant of Vice President Cheney and adviser to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, now denounces his erstwhile friends for running the worst administration in modern times.

Some of what is happening now was commonplace in past administrations. During Clinton's tenure -- and, I'm told, during those of his predecessors -- it was possible within limits to gain insight into how the White House worked. Reporters who had a question about economic policy could call the president's economic adviser, those writing on health care could call his domestic policy adviser, those with legal queries could call the counsel's office. None of those officials in the Bush White House returns reporters' calls.

In the past, it usually became known who was being considered for the Supreme Court or top administration posts long before any announcements were made. Options for welfare policy and diplomatic initiatives were effectively vetted in the media before landing on the president's desk. At times, that put Clinton's disarray on public display, but on many other occasions, it helped air dissent and further legitimize debate.

"Within reason, it's healthy for the system," Lockhart said. "You can't govern through the newspapers. But you also can't govern with six people in the room. You have to strike a balance." In the first two years of Clinton's presidency, "there was too much public argument," he added. "But by the end of the administration, the balance was pretty good."

Bush didn't think so, and he came into office determined to do things differently. Leaks, in his view, were a sign of a disorderly White House. Nothing should get out that was not supposed to get out. And his ability to make that stick through so many years suggested an unusual solidarity among his team. Bush remembered people in his father's White House coming to him as the president's son to complain that they had no access to the Oval Office. The son vowed not to repeat that management pattern and believed that by keeping an open door, there would be less incentive for aides to go to the media to be heard.

"You've got two polar extremes there," said Trent Duffy, a former Bush spokesman, comparing his White House with the previous one. "The main reason the Bush White House was able to maintain such a level of discipline was largely because they and the vice president's office were really in sync and there wasn't a lot of freelancing, versus the Clinton White House, which was the opposite."

Still, as Duffy noted, the signature disagreement of Bush's first term did eventually become public -- the struggle over the Iraq war between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on one side and Cheney and Rumsfeld on the other. The losing side in that struggle, Powell's State Department, was more likely to leak, a pattern that irritated Bush and the West Wing.

Every White House engages in strategic leaks that are planned and authorized at the top -- information placed without fingerprints to advance a particular goal or undercut a rival. Some aides in the Clinton White House kept a list of whose turn it was to receive a leak of an initiative that the president was soon to announce -- if it's Tuesday, it must be USA Today. Those sorts of meaningless 24-hour scoops were designed to maximize coverage of something the White House wanted covered on the theory that the recipient media organization would play up its "exclusive" and others would chase it.

The other kind of authorized leak can blow up on a White House, as the Bush team discovered when an attempt to discredit former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war, triggered a special counsel investigation that ultimately led to the indictment and conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, for perjury and obstruction of justice.

But it is the unauthorized leak that every president rails against and, in the end, finds impossible to stop. Now Bush sees it happening more often. In the past few weeks, for example, The Washington Post reported on internal e-mails sent by White House aide Elliott Abrams blasting the president's nuclear agreement with North Korea. And the New York Times detailed an effort by Rumsfeld's replacement, Robert M. Gates, to shut down Guantanamo Bay, a proposal blocked by Cheney and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

Those are classic Washington stories, where debates on important issues of unquestionable public interest are aired in the open, something that might not have happened all that long ago. Duffy said that may stem from a somewhat more open environment fostered in the past year by White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and press secretary Tony Snow, who are not wedded to rote talking points.

Rather than shun the media, Snow has made a point of putting the president and top aides out for more interviews as well as off-the-record meetings with journalists. "It's obvious the White House is doing things they didn't do in the first term," Duffy said. "Tony has a totally different approach."

Snow also hasn't sweated garden-variety leaks the way others used to. After Bush recently held an unpublicized meeting with a Russian general accused of war crimes in Chechnya, a government official leaked it to Human Rights Watch, which tipped off The Post. The resulting publicity prompted the White House to disavow knowing about the general's past and to swear off any future contacts.

The Russians were annoyed. No doubt they wished the old Kremlin techniques were still in effect.

bakerp@washpost.com

Peter Baker is a Washington Post White House correspondent.

House Overturns Bush Order To Widen Presidential Papers Access

House overturns Bush order on papers secrecy
Wed Mar 14, 2007 7:48 PM ET

By Peter Szekely

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Brushing aside a veto threat, the House of Representatives voted on Wednesday to overturn a 2001 order by President George W. Bush that lets former presidents keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The measure, which drew bipartisan support and passed by a veto-busting 333-93 margin, was among White House-opposed bills the House passed that would widen access to government information and protect government whistleblowers.

"Today, Congress took an important step toward restoring openness and transparency in government," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman said.

The presidential papers bill nullifies a November 2001 order, criticized by historians, in which Bush allowed the White House or a former president to block release of a former president's papers and put the onus on researchers to show a "specific need" for many types of records.

Among beneficiaries of the Bush order was Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, a former vice president and president.

The order gave former vice presidents the right to stop the release of their papers through an executive privilege that previously only presidents could use. And it extended to deceased presidents' designees rights to keep their papers secret indefinitely.

The House bill would give current and former presidents 40 business days to object to requests to view their papers, allow a sitting president to override a former president's claim of executive privilege and strip former vice presidents and the designees of deceased presidents of the power to use executive privilege to block access to their historical documents.

In its veto warning, the White House said the bill encroaches on the president's constitutional authority and the 40-day deadline would force presidents to use executive privilege to block information requests "out of an abundance of caution" and thereby invite litigation.

The real reason, the White House said, for delays of up to five years in releasing presidential papers to researchers is a lack of archivists at presidential libraries.

Many historians, however, support the House bill, saying the Bush order has slowed the declassification process.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archives at George Washington University, said the average time to release presidential documents has grown to 78 months from 18 months since the Bush order, which he said directly contributed to one year of the lag.

A similar bill is expected to be introduced in the Senate.

Also passed by the House by a 331-94 margin, despite another veto threat, was a bill aimed at bolstering protections of government whistleblowers who report wrongdoing, especially those with private contractors and national security and scientific agencies.

A third bill, which passed 308-117, was aimed at speeding requests for government information made under the Freedom of Information Act. The White House stopped short of threatening to veto it but said it could not support the bill.

Guantanamo Is Not a Prison

Tomgram: Karen Greenberg, Gitmo Decorum

Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guantanamo was the sort of place where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a recalcitrant prisoner "extracted" from a cell for training purposes, could be beaten almost senseless. This actually happened to 35 year-old "model soldier" Sean Baker, who had been in Gulf War I and signed on again immediately after the World Trade Center went down. His unit was assigned to Guantanamo and he volunteered to be just such a "prisoner," donning the requisite orange uniform on January 24, 2003. As a result of his "extraction" and brutal beating, he was left experiencing regular epileptic-style seizures ten to twelve times a day. (And remember the Immediate Reaction Force team of MPs that seized him, on finally realizing that he wasn't a genuine prisoner, broke off their assault before finishing the job.)

If you happened to be an actual prisoner -- putting aside the female interrogators who smeared red paint (meant to mimic menstrual blood) on Arab detainees as a form of humiliation -- you might end up like this:

"The A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night."

Or this:

''I saw another detainee sitting on the floor of the interview room with an Israeli flag draped around him, loud music being played, and a strobe light flashing."

Or this:

"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18, 24 hours or more."

These were, in fact, descriptions provided by outraged FBI agents assigned to Guantanamo in 2004 in memos or emails to their bosses back on the mainland. They confirmed prisoner claims that "military personnel beat and kicked them while they had hoods on their heads and tight shackles on their legs, left them in freezing temperatures and stifling heat, subjected them to repeated, prolonged rectal exams and paraded them naked around the prison as military police snapped pictures," and so on.

Ah, but those were the good old days when Guantanamo was the real "24" -- the only problem being that there wasn't a "ticking bomb" prisoner in sight, just a former Australian professional kangaroo skinner, who had joined the Taliban before September 11, 2001 and never fired a shot at American forces, as well as a man who was supposedly Osama bin Laden's chauffeur. That was kind of top o' the line for the prisoners Guantanamo held until, last September, the real bad guys -- 14 of them – were transferred there from the CIA's secret prisons and torture chambers elsewhere on the planet.

Now, Karen Greenberg, Tomdispatch regular and co-editor of The Torture Papers, has visited the new Guantanamo and she offers us an up-to-date lesson in Gitmo decorum. Tom

Guantanamo Is Not a Prison

11 Ways to Report on Gitmo without Upsetting the Pentagon
By Karen J. Greenberg

Several weeks ago, I took the infamous media tour of the facilities at Guantanamo. From the moment I arrived on a dilapidated Air Sunshine plane to the time I boarded it heading home, I had no doubt that I was on a foreign planet or, at the very least, visiting an impeccably constructed movie set. Along with two European colleagues, I was treated to two-days-plus of a military-tour schedule packed with site visits and interviews (none with actual prisoners) designed to "make transparent" the base, its facilities, and its manifold contributions to our country's national security.

The multi-storied, maximum security complexes, rimmed in concertina wire, set off from the road by high wire-mesh fences, and the armed tower guards at Camp Delta, present a daunting sight. Even the less restrictive quarters for "compliant" inmates belied any notion that Guantanamo is merely a holding facility for those awaiting charges or possessing useful information.

In the course of my brief stay, thanks to my military handlers, I learned a great deal about Gitmo decorum, as the military would like us to practice it. My escorts told me how best to describe the goings-on at Guantanamo, regardless of what my own eyes and prior knowledge told me.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up. Consider this a guide of sorts to what the officially sanctioned report on Guantanamo would look like, wrapped in the proper decorum and befitting the jewel-in-the-crown of American offshore prisons… or, to be Pentagon-accurate, "detention facilities."

1. Guantanamo is not a prison. According to the military handlers who accompanied us everywhere, Guantanamo is officially a "detention facility." Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were actually modeled on maximum and medium security prisons in Indiana and Michigan respectively, and although the use of feeding tubes and the handling of prisoners now take into account the guidelines of the American Corrections Association (and increasingly those of the Bureau of Prisons as well), it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" while at Gitmo.

2. Consistent with not being a prison, Guantanamo has no prisoners, only enemies, specifically, "unlawful enemy combatants." One of my colleagues was even chastised for using the word "detainee." "Detained enemy combatants" or "unlawful enemy combatants," we learned, were the proper terms.

3. Guantanamo is not about guilt and innocence -- or, once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris, Jr.,the Commanding Officer of Guantanamo tells us. "And they are all unlawful enemy combatants." This, despite the existence of the official category "No Longer an Enemy Combatant" which does not come up in our discussions. Nor was the possibility that any of the detainees at Guantanamo might have been mistakenly detained ever discussed. As the administrator for the tribunals that are to determine the status of each detainee explained to us, the U.S. Government takes "a risk when we transfer" detainees out of Guantanamo.

4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. Our handlers use the term "habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for lawyers in general, both defense attorneys -- those who are defending their clients before the military commissions -- and habeas attorneys, those who seek to challenge in U.S. courts the government's right to detain their clients. The U.S. military and its Public Affairs Officers are convinced that the terrorists are transmitting information to their colleagues in the outside world via their lawyers. According to our escorts, "habeas lawyers" may be the unwitting pawns of terrorists. As a power-point presentation at the outset of our formal tour (and as subsequent remarks make clear to us), it is the belief of the American authorities that the detainees are using their lawyers in accordance with the directives outlined in the al-Qaeda training manual that was discovered in Manchester, England in 2000. This manual, they assure us, encourages terrorists to "take advantage of visits with habeas lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside."

5. Recently, at least, few if any reliable journalists have been reporting on Guantanamo; only potential betrayers are writing about it. "The media" arrive with ostensibly open eyes. Yet these guests, graciously hosted from morning to night, go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect," as I was told more than once by military public information office personnel, and "we just don't understand it." For our part, we visitors didn't understand why we were forbidden to walk anywhere -- even to the bathroom -- by ourselves, talk to anyone other than those we were introduced to (none actual prisoners), or even take a morning run up and down the street we were lodged on, although there was not a prisoner in sight.

6. After years of isolation, the detainees still possess valuable information -- especially today. When asked what kind of useful information the detainees could possibly have for interrogators, many already locked away in Gitmo for over five years, the answer was: "I believe that we are, in fact, getting good and useful and interesting intelligence -- even after five years." Right now, they are especially useful. This is because, Admiral Harris told us, "We have up-and-coming leadership in al-Qaeda and in the Taliban in Afghanistan [and] we don't know what they look like. There's never been a photograph taken of them or there's never been a photograph that US forces have of them. But their contemporaries… are quite often the same individuals that are in the camps here today. So we will work with law enforcement… and their sketch artists will work with these detainees, the compliant and cooperative detainees… And those pictures will be sent out to the forward fighting area." No one asked just how reliable our own memories would be after five years of isolated detention.

7. Guantanamo contains no individuals -- inside the wire or out. The prisoners are referred to not by name, but by number. The guards and others, even outside the confines of the prison camp, remove the Velcroed names which are on their uniforms, leaving blank strips on their chests where their identity would normally be, or they replace their names with their ranks. Either way, they strive to remain anonymous. They tell us that they fear retaliation against themselves and their families from a presumably all-seeing, all-reaching jihadi network. With the media, most follow the same rules. We, too, could evidently land them in trouble with al-Qaeda. Thus, many refuse to tell us their names, warning those we greet to be careful not to mistakenly call them by name in front of us.

8. Guantanamo's deep respect for Islam is unappreciated. All the food served in the prison is halal, prepared in a separate kitchen, constructed solely for the detainees. All cells, outdoor areas, and even the detainee waiting room in the courthouse where the Military Commissions will be held, have arrows pointing to Mecca. All compliant detainees have prayer rugs and prayer beads. All detainees, no matter how they behave, have Korans. The library includes books on Islamic history, Islamic philosophy, and on Mohammed and his followers. Our escorts are armored against our protests about the denial of legal rights to prisoners. The right to challenge their detention in court, actually being charged with a crime, or adhering to the basic rules of procedure and evidence that undergird American law -- none of this is important. They do not see that what's at stake is not building a mosque at Gitmo, any more than it is about serving gourmet food, or about the cushy, leather interrogation chairs we are shown. It is about extending the most basic of legal rights, including the presumption of innocence, to those detained here.

9. At Guantanamo, hard facts are scarce. This, we are told, is a security measure. "As the 342nd media group to come through here, you'll notice that we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security measures. We don't want to take away position" -- a phrase which I took as shorthand for revealing actual numbers, names, locations, dates, etc.

Typical examples of preserving Gitmo security through a refusal to give out specific facts:

"What is that building?" [I am referring to one directly in our view.]
"Which building?"

"How long has the lieutenant been here?"
"Since she got here."

"Where is Radio Range?" [This is the area on which the camps are built.]
"I never heard of it."

10. Guantanamo houses no contradictions. And if you notice any -- and they're hard to miss -- it's best to keep quiet about them, unless you want a sergeant without a name chastising you about the dangers posed by enemy combatants, or one of the officers without a name reprimanding your lower ranking escort for giving out "misinformation." Stories are regularly presented to portray a policy as particularly generous to the detainees; only later does someone mention that it might have been an answer to the needs of the guards themselves. A typical example:

"We allow two hours of recreation a day in order to comply with the Geneva Conventions," they tell us. But a guide at another moment leads us to believe that there is actually a more pressing reason for allowing the recreation. "We need them to go outside so that we can search their cells for weapons and contraband."

These sorts of contradictions leave me ultimately feeling sorry for our escorts. It is not their fault that they know so little about the place they are charged with explaining to us. Most of them arrived roughly eight months ago and were handed a defensive script. They are often quite sincere when they tell us that they don't know answers to our questions.

They actually don't know what went on before their arrival, or where things were located in earlier days, or if perchance abuses or outbursts, not to speak of torture, might have occurred at Gitmo, or even who was in charge as little as a year ago. Few, if any, from the old days are there to instruct or correct them.

Of course, if they wanted to, they could learn the details that many of us have picked up over the years simply by reading or by talking to those who spent time there. But this is not their task; they are but mouthpieces, nothing more, as they try to tell us time and again when we ask our questions. And, anyway, they themselves expect to leave relatively unscathed sometime this spring.

Finally, for those of us who want to write about Guantanamo and who are grateful for having been shown around and had the myths and realities of the Bush administration's most notorious detention facility laid out so clearly, a final lesson:

11. Those who fail to reproduce the official narrative are not welcome back. "Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warns me over lunch.

Only time will tell if I got it right.

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law and is the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and editor of The Torture Debate in America.

Copyright 2007 Karen J. Greenberg

How to Bury a Secret: Turn It Into Paperwork

Millions of Pages Are Declassified, but That Doesn't Necessarily Mean Divulged

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 16, 2007; C01

At the stroke of midnight on Dec. 31, something profound happened in the government secrecy system. With little fanfare, the paradigm of secrecy shifted.

The days when secrets would be secret forever officially ended that night. Some 700 million pages of secret documents became unsecret. No longer were they classified. They became . . . public. Imagine it: Some 400 million formerly classified pages at the National Archives, another 270 million at the FBI, 30 million elsewhere, all emerging into the sunshine of open government, squinting and pale, like naked mole rats.

This would seem a victory for freedom of information, just as President Bill Clinton envisioned when he signed Executive Order 12958 in 1995 (affirmed by President Bush in 2003), which mandated that 25-year-old documents be automatically declassified unless exempted for national security or other reasons.

But it is not so simple. There is a dirty little secret about these secrets: They remain secreted away. You still can't rush down to the National Archives to check them out. In fact, it could be years before these public documents can be viewed by the public.

Fifty archivists can process 40 million pages in a year, but now they are facing 400 million. The backlog, inside the National Archives II facility in College Park, measures 160,000 cubic feet inside a massive classified vault with special lighting and climate controls to preserve old paper. Row upon row of electronically operated steel shelves, all a pale gray, hold hundreds of thousands of document boxes buffered to fight destructive acidity. The place feels like the set of a science fiction movie, all pristine and orderly and hushed.

Inside the boxes are documents that have to be scrutinized and processed according to the classification instructions written on them by staffers in any one of several agencies, which leaves archivists with a task not unlike deciphering a 25-year-old crime scene.

"It's like 'CSI,' only it's in records," says Neil Carmichael, the supervisory archivist. "You never know what you're going to get."

The work, says Jeanne Schauble, is "esoteric," all about arcane rules and layers of document review. She holds the rather Orwellian title of director of the Initial Processing and Declassification Division at the National Archives, which means she leads the beleaguered team of archivists faced with the task of making open government real.

"The United States has the most open government in the world," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, "but it also has the most secretive government in the world, if you measure it by the production of new secrets."

And so, among the 400 million pages of documents awaiting their release are road maps to American history in the 1950s and 1960s: old mob investigations and the chase after Communist activists; kidnappings and bank robberies; diplomatic doings no longer deemed sensitive. But frankly, no one really knows what's there -- except the officials who originally classified them.

Not only are archivists overwhelmed by the number of documents that have arrived at the facility; they also face the strange mumbo jumbo of competing declassification instructions from various agencies. (Some agencies have given archivists with the appropriate security clearances the authority to make declassification decisions.)

When they open a box containing these old records, the archivists see a series of papers with white tabs affixed bearing numbers, dates, letters, slashes and circles that are supposed to tell them how to proceed. Each agency has a different dialect, a different set of codes for communicating its wishes to the National Archives. One agency might use an "R" to mean release, while another agency might use an "R" to mean retain.

"Each time we crack a new record group, we have to wait for that learning curve," says Meredith Wagner, an archive specialist.

Discovering the precise intent of these codes takes up time with perhaps annoying phone calls to the agencies. "But they are more annoyed if we release something they didn't intend for us to release," says Schauble.

Another minefield is the "equity" issue, which involves more than one agency having an interest in a document and its classified information. For example, if the State Department has used CIA information in its document, then both agencies have to review it for declassification. That means a document has to be pulled from boxes repeatedly -- not a good idea with delicate old paper, often of the onionskin variety.

To solve this problem, a National Declassification Initiative has been established so that agencies can sort out their equity issues together, around the same table, at the same time, and perhaps prevent embarrassments such as occurred last year when previously public information was reclassified. This new project is in its early stages.

Finally, the archivists spend their days poring over these papers, straining their eyes, kinking their necks and knowing that a lot of those classified documents never needed to be classified in the first place. In the secrecy system, over-classification is rampant. On that point, people in and out of government agree. The 9/11 Commission Report decried the level of government secrecy as a national security obstacle. A Defense Department official testified before Congress in August 2004 that perhaps 50 percent of classified documents did not need that designation.

Leaks and unauthorized disclosure of classified information are bad, "but the flip side is equally damaging, and that is the over-classification of information," says J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which reports to both the National Archives as well as the White House.

To manage all this secrecy -- to store it, secure it, process it -- costs the country $7.7 billion in 2005, Leonard says.

Says Aftergood: "We are reaping the consequences of past neglect. For decades, the agencies have been allowed to run roughshod. They've been allowed to classify at will and to completely neglect the declassification side of the equation."

Old secrets also can provide context for new crises. For example, U.S. dealings with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s are still coming to light.

"It's our history, and in many cases, it's our present," Aftergood says.

With a proverbial sword hanging over their heads, agencies (excepting those associated with national security) were forced to change their secrecy culture when Clinton signed his executive order. They had to review their documents and argue for their continued classification, or see them all automatically made public. Some 400 million were declassified even before the Dec. 31, 2006, deadline. Add that backlog to the most recent 700 million declassified pages, and the mountain of paper surpasses a billion pages. But it wasn't as if these documents spilled out of a vault or were shoved out the front door of the FBI.

"You can't come down Pennsylvania Avenue and find them on the sidewalk," joked David M. Hardy, chief of the FBI's record/information dissemination section.

The FBI's declassified records are in its own repositories. Many other declassified agency records, including those of the State and Treasury departments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Federal Aviation Administration, are at Archives II in College Park.

Aftergood says he is expecting some surprises of an unknown nature, not based on anything he knows but on what he doesn't know. That, he says, is the value of declassification: offering up the unexpected.

"Without having a clue as to what they are," he said, "I'm confident they're in there."