Chapters (11)
Of the reported 83,000 people detained in the United States and abroad, only 335 were prosecuted as terrorists, of whom only 213 were convicted and only 123 were found to have committed a crime serious enough to be jailed.19
Among those arrested was James Yee, a 1990 West Point military academy graduate and a Christian convert to Islam who was appointed the Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay. He was hounded because he had warned against the mistreatment of Muslim prisoners there. In September 2003, he was thrown into solitary confinement and charged with mutiny, sedition, espionage and aiding the enemy. When all those charges had to be abandoned for lack of evidence, he was slapped with lesser, still trumped-up charges of having porn on his computer and committing adultery. By March 2004, those charges, too, were dropped.20
Jingoism, Not Journalisn
Throughout all this, many in the American media kept echoing the steady drumbeat of the Bush propaganda, producing more jingoism than journalism. Little wonder, then, that even as late as December 2004, when most of the abuses against Muslims were well known, 44 percent of Americans believed in restricting the civil rights of Muslim Americans, according to a nationwide survey by Cornell University.21
American democracy, however, does work, albeit slowly. Thanks to the diligence of human rights activists, including academics and some investigative journalists, a clearer picture has emerged of how the Bush administration, operating mostly in secret, violated both international and American law, in four broad areas:
• Indiscriminate detentions, suspension of the most basic rights of the detainees and a denial of access to them by such agencies as the International Red Cross;
• Coercive interrogations, including torture, redefined so expansively by the administration — it is torture only if it leads to “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death”22 — that Bush could claim that “we don’t do torture.” This is while detainees were being subjected to harrowing punishments, including slapping them on the head; depriving them of food; keeping them manacled in stress positions for prolonged periods; forcing them to stay naked for hours in a frigid cell or having them stand in the 50°C (122°F) heat of Iraqi summers; depriving them of sleep for days by battering them with thundering music; or subjecting them to “waterboarding,” simulated drowning.23
• Delayed trials or no trials for the detainees or, in the case of those held at Guantanamo Bay, military commissions that were derided as kangaroo courts, and that were so fraught with problems that only one case was completed in the first five years.
• Secret surveillance, including wiretapping, of suspected (Muslim) residents of the US and all those they associated with.