Gitmo and the unseeing

I've avoided reading about the Gitmo files up until now, because it's a nice day and I already know way, way too much about torture. And yet:

Faced with the worst-ever single attack by foreigners on American soil, the U.S. military set up a human intelligence laboratory at Guantanamo that used interrogation and detention practices that they largely made up as they went along.

…

The documents, more than 750 individual assessments of former and current Guantanamo detainees, show an intelligence operation that was tremendously dependant on informants — both prison camp snitches repeating what they'd heard from fellow captives and self-described, at times self-aggrandizing, alleged al Qaida insiders turned government witnesses who Pentagon records show have since been released.

The portrait of the incompetence, chaos and sometimes brutality that emerges from the files is sadly familiar. I read similar accounts in Jane Mayer's The Dark Side when I was doing research for The Rapture two years ago. The sad fact is that most of these revelations had been pieced together from other sources, yet no one has really cared. No matter how many times new and damaging facts come to light, we can't seem to wrap our heads around it.

Right now I'm reading China Miéville's The City and the City. Part of its premise is that two cities exist simultaneously on top of one another. There are parts where the two cities bleed into one another – 'crosshatches.' People can see the other city but have trained themselves to look directly at it and yet not allow themselves to see the other people, the other buildings – to 'unsee' it.

That is precisely what we have been doing ever since Guantanamo opened. Now we have America's own documents showing the detention of a senile 89 year-old, a fourteen year-old boy who was the victim of a kidnapping, and a man brought to the prison because of the knowledge of Khowst and Kabul he'd learned as a taxi driver. They held an Al-Jazeera cameraman named Sami al-Hajj for six years claiming he was a terrorist courier, but then interrogated him about the news network. We know people were tortured there out of desperation, fear and simple incompetence.

We already know, but we refuse to see.