We don’t think we can put it any better than the New York Times editorial page did Monday, so we won’t even try: “The news that three inmates at Guantanamo Bay hanged themselves should not have surprised anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the twisted history of the camp that President Bush built for selected prisoners from Afghanistan and antiterrorist operations. It was the inevitable result of creating a netherworld of despair beyond the laws of civilized nations, where men were to be held without any hope of decent treatment, impartial justice or, in so many cases, even eventual release.”
Sad to say, but the news pages of the country’s major papers need to count themselves among those that paid only the “slightest attention.” Thus the tone of bewilderment that crept into articles about the deaths.
It strikes us that the suicide of the three inmates at Guantanamo — “terrorists” though they may be, “evil” though they may be — is also, in some indirect way, a result of the press’ ignorance of the Kafkaesque situation these men found themselves in. Over the past years, there have been numerous hunger strikes and suicide attempts involving dozens and sometimes hundreds of detainees. And the media, though they touched periodically on the issue — most recently to report that the British attorney general and the United Nations were demanding the camp’s closure — never elevated the problem to a level where it might have elicited more than the bare minimum of moral indignation from the public.
It’s hard to understand why it’s only now, and then only in the tenth paragraph of the New York Times article on the suicides (and not at all in the Washington Post’s article) that we are presented with the fact that “only 10 of the roughly 465 men held at Guantanamo have been charged before military tribunals, and that recently released documents indicate that many have never been accused even in administrative proceedings of belonging to al Qaeda or attacking the United States.”
As we noted in February, at least two academic studies, closely examining the government’s own documents, have concluded that an overwhelming majority of these prisoners are at best “associated” with the Taliban or al Qaeda; just eight percent are considered “fighters for” those groups, and only 30 percent “members of.” No newspaper articles have yet mentioned either of these reports. Instead, as in the articles on the suicides, any description of the unusual extra-judicial incarceration and treatment of the detainees (who may or may not be innocent) is attributed to easily dismissed “human rights advocates.”
Even on Sunday, when the news broke, it was only the Los Angeles Times that took the step of explicitly referring to the fact that the detainees are “being held without charges” in its lede. Doing this shouldn’t be considered a bold move — among other things, it’s the truth. But in light of how other national papers skirted the issue, mostly saving the condition of the men until the middle or end of their articles, it does seem like a kind of bravery to say it outright.
But the real problem is not with the way the situation at Guantanamo was described after the suicides. What we find disturbing is how the situation has been covered until now.
A quick Lexis-Nexis search for “Guantanamo” proves just how inadequate newspapers have been to the task of telling this story. Nearly every article that appears is a breaking news story about a new hunger strike, a court battle over forced feeding, or an organization like the UN voicing concern about the detainees.
It’s hard to find any pieces that remind readers of exactly what the administration was, and, for all we know, still is, up to — the indefinite nature of the detentions, the absence of a judicial process, and the increasing likelihood that many of the detained are not guilty of any crime, anti-American or otherwise.
This is a case — and a damning one at that — in which the straitjacketed writing style of newspaper journalism and the demands of the daily news cycle have smothered the news instead of exposing it.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.