God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (30 page)

There is ample precedent in American history for “preemption.” Starting in 1919, amid a Red Scare precipitated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a spate of bombings in the United States, the Justice Department launched the so-called Palmer Raids, named for A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general at the time. In a letter to the U.S. Senate, Palmer indicated that he had drawn up a list of 60,000 presumed radicals. He requested new legislation to suppress radical publications.
The raids, led by the young J. Edgar Hoover, rounded up targeted individuals by the thousands. They were held in detention centers and often deported. The efforts enjoyed broad public support. In the words of a
Washington Post
editorial, “There is no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberties.”

Beginning in 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, as many as 110,000 Japanese Americans were sequestered in internment camps without due process, on the grounds that, as a group, they represented a potential threat to the United States. The general in charge of the internment put it bluntly: “In the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by migration.
The Japanese race is an enemy race.
”
The italics are his. Among other things, the internment underscored the value of careful data collection. Although the fact was long denied, the Census Bureau, whose records are normally confidential, provided assistance in tracking down Japanese Americans.
Years later, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon would leverage another cache of confidential data—the files of the Internal Revenue Service—for their own political purposes.

A second and more sustained Red Scare commenced with the onset of the Cold War. The official reaction to it, though often referred to loosely as McCarthyism—after Senator Joseph McCarthy, who leveled damaging accusations at hundreds of individuals whom he suspected of being communists or harboring communist sympathies—was in large part undertaken by the FBI, now led by Hoover. Governments at every level set up boards to look into the loyalty of their employees. So did private companies. One scholar in the mid-1950s estimated that 20 percent of all workers in the country had, as a condition of employment, “taken a test oath, or completed a loyalty statement, or achieved official clearance, or survived some undefined private scrutiny”—a far deeper penetration than any inquisition by the Church could claim.

McCarthy’s efforts lost steam, and he was discredited, but the FBI carried on under the aegis of its secret
COINTELPRO
operation, which was directed mostly at leftist groups, civil rights activists, and, later, antiwar protesters. A prominent book on the subject—
The Boss,
by Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox—is subtitled
J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition.
COINTELPRO
personnel, the authors write, “were authorized to use subterfuge, plant agents provocateurs, leak derogatory information to the press, and employ other disruptive tactics to destabilize the operations of targeted groups.”
Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency, whose charter prohibits any domestic national-security role, pursued a covert mail-opening program directed at Americans, compiling a database of 1.5 million names.
Another secret CIA program, known as
CHAOS,
infiltrated a broad range of domestic antiwar organizations.

Hoover’s convictions were absolute, and he had a high pulpit. He warned about America’s “dangerously indulgent attitude toward crime, filth, and corruption.” He denounced those he saw as “mortal enemies of freedom and deniers of God Himself.”
COINTELPRO
was shut down in 1971, soon after its existence had been exposed by activists.
CHAOS
was quietly terminated in 1973, not long before its activities became the subject of a
New York Times
investigation. That same year, Richard Nixon remarked to an aide that Hoover “had a file on everybody.” This was not quite true: Hoover had files on only 25 million people—at the time, one out of eight Americans.

Legislative oversight, like that provided by the Church Committee in the 1970s, has brought some abuses to light. But the combination of moral panic and existential fear is a potent one. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act, which allows the authorities to conduct “sneak and peek” searches without immediately notifying subjects, permits access to business records “in connection with” counterterrorism investigations, and expands to the point of vagueness the meaning of “material support” for terrorism.
Most of its provisions have been reauthorized. In 2002, the National Security Agency was secretly given license to tap telephone conversations between people in the United States and people abroad without obtaining a warrant beforehand.
Legislation eventually gave some legal cover to this practice, though it has run into trouble in the courts.

No actions connected with the post-9/11 period have received more attention than the use of torture to elicit information from prisoners captured in the war on terrorism. These methods have been referred to by the euphemism “enhanced interrogation.” The term brings to mind the euphemism for torture that the Roman Inquisition employed—
rigoroso esamine
, or “rigorous examination.”
Torture has been employed on detainees in Bagram prison, in Afghanistan, and at numerous black sites in other countries. In the minds of much of the world, the American regime of torture is crystallized in the single word “Guantánamo.”

The detention facilities at Guantánamo are collectively known as Camp Delta. They were built after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which was launched in response to the 9/11 attacks. The Afghanistan war rapidly produced prisoners by the hundreds—suspected Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters, all of them Muslim, some of them certainly dangerous, some of them old men or young boys. Roughly 750 detainees have been held at Guantánamo altogether; about 175 were still there in 2011.
Camp Delta replaced Camp X Ray, the original facility, built years ago to hold Haitian boat people. The famous photograph of the first detainees arriving at Guantánamo, shackled and blindfolded, kneeling in their orange jumpsuits in an open-air passage between chain-link fences, was taken at Camp X Ray. That spot is now overgrown with vegetation. The camp has been abandoned. Flowering vines climb the fences and creep along the barbed wire. Wooden watchtowers creak as you ascend by ladder for the view. The grass comes up to your waist; you can hear the rustle of rodents and reptiles at your feet, but can see nothing. On the perimeter of Camp X Ray stand two long wooden buildings, each divided into several rooms that were used in the early days to conduct interrogations. Tables and benches are fixed solidly to the floor. Bits of duct tape lie among the droppings of banana rats.

Guantánamo has been a focus of intense international criticism ever since the first prisoners arrived, in January 2002.
Many reports, later confirmed in detail, concerned the use of torture during the interrogation of detainees. The nature of the legal regime at Guantánamo also provoked condemnation. The Guantánamo Bay Naval Base is considered U.S. territory, and federal law governs there in ways that are apparent to any visitor. Iguanas, for instance, are everywhere—on lawns, in parking lots, inside the detention facilities. They are a protected species under federal law. Signs on the roadways warn of a $10,000 fine for even the inadvertent killing of an iguana. And yet as far as the detainees are concerned, Guantánamo was chosen because it represented a “legal black hole”: it was not part of the constitutional homeland, the Bush administration argued, or subject to the same legal standards that might obtain within that homeland. Detainees could therefore be subjected to any legal regime the authorities decided to implement.

In effect, Guantánamo was chosen because it was a place where it was legal to have no legal regime at all. Habeas corpus did not apply—until, after years had elapsed, the Supreme Court ruled that it must. Detainees did not have to be told why they were being held. Their captors did not have to justify holding them. Nor did they need to divulge the names of the detainees. Where and how they should stand trial, if trial was warranted, remained a matter of contention. Among other things, the abuse of prisoners has tainted much of the evidence. An area of tents and makeshift buildings at Guantánamo is known as Camp Justice; it’s the place set aside for the proceedings called military commissions. The Bush administration originally envisaged a $100 million facility for this purpose, and then scaled the plans back to a $12 million courtroom. Spectators sit behind soundproof glass; testimony is relayed by audio feed on a twenty-second delay, and can be cut off if classified information is divulged.
By the summer of 2011, only five detainees had made their way through the process.

In 2010, the technicians at Google Labs introduced a feature called the Books Ngram Viewer, which allows users to discover the frequency with which particular words have been employed in published books going back hundreds of years. The pool is large: some 500 billion words in more than 5 million digitized books (and covering several languages).
If you search for the word “Guantánamo,” you’ll see that it underwent a sharp uptick during the past decade. You’ll see the same pattern if you search for the word “inquisition.” The two words have become tightly linked, in the United States and around the world. “The Guantánamo Inquisition.”
“Guantánamo’s Inquisitors.”
“Waterboarding: From the Inquisition to Guantánamo.”
You don’t have to look very hard.

“All Means Necessary”

To reach the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, you must travel four hours by airplane on one of two flights that operate daily out of Fort Lauderdale. The trip would be shorter if the aircraft did not have to avoid Cuban airspace, making a large loop around the island and approaching from the south. The planes are small, and until recently did not have restrooms. The passengers are mainly military personnel and defense contractors. The airport occupies the smaller of Guantánamo’s two peninsulas, on the leeward side. A short ferry ride takes you to the larger peninsula, on the windward side.

Not far from the landing, at Fisherman’s Point, stands a stone monument with a bronze plaque. It commemorates the arrival here of Christopher Columbus in 1494. He was on his second voyage, with a fleet of seventeen ships, and had brought with him 1,200 colonists. The fleet also carried five
religiosos,
whose job it would be to serve the colonists and also bring the indigenous people into the bosom of the Church.
Columbus had been looking for gold but found only fish, which Indians were cooking on the shore.
The Spaniards took note of the many iguanas, not yet endangered. In that same year, the pope would divide the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal. The Inquisition was paying attention to the New World, including Cuba, within decades.

Cuba achieved independence from Spain in 1902, after the Spanish-American War, and the United States, wanting a naval base, took a perpetual lease on about forty-five square miles of territory on the two peninsulas enclosing Guantánamo Bay. Under the terms of the lease, the U.S. government pays Cuba $4,085 a year. Fidel Castro, protesting the U.S. presence, has for fifty years refused to cash the checks, reportedly keeping them in a drawer.
The naval base is cut off from the rest of Cuba by hills. At night a sine curve of floodlit fencing marks the ridgeline. The hills also cut off the area from rain, making conditions at Guantánamo dry and hot. Military vehicles carry coolers filled with bottled water. So do civilians in their own cars, which are referred to as POVs, for “personally owned vehicles.” The Indians left behind massive shell heaps known as middens. If American forces leave middens, they will consist of Dasani bottles.

The U.S. government does not issue detailed maps of the detention facilities at Guantánamo, and any aerial pictures of the base taken by passengers on incoming aircraft are deleted by security personnel. Pictures taken by departing passengers are fine. A Renaissance censor must be making the rules. In 2010, a Stanford University archaeologist named Adrian Myers used Google Earth images from 2003 and 2008 to map in detail the rapid growth of Camp Delta, from the makeshift facilities that existed on 9/11 to the permanent structures built since then.
The newest buildings are modeled directly on “supermax” prisons in the United States. Camp 5, one of the maximum-security facilities, is a replica of a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Camp 6, another maximum-security facility, replicates a prison in Lenawee, Michigan.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other high-value prisoners are held in Camp 7, which is off by itself. Camp 4 is the most relaxed of the facilities. In the detainee library, I noticed several complete sets of Harry Potter and also a copy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s
Will to Power,
and wondered if hard-line members of Congress knew about either of these selections.

Imperial spores carry the imprint of the homeland. The Indies, declared Columbus, were to be governed “according to the custom and practice of Castile.”
Guantánamo in this sense is no different from any other American outpost. It has strip malls, fast-food restaurants, and residential communities that look like any suburb. Ramps on the buildings and cuts in the sidewalks indicate that the Americans With Disabilities Act is very much in force. Signs caution against sexual harassment. Psychological counseling is a phone call away. There are Protestant and Catholic churches, but you can also find a rabbi or an imam if you need one.

You can’t escape the religious overtones at Guantánamo. A single kitchen the size of a warehouse, presided over by a no-nonsense Filipina (a “third-country national,” or TCN, as such workers are called), prepares meals for troops and detainees alike. Pasta is boiled in industrial pots that tip mechanically, as if at a steel mill. Half the operation is
halal,
to ensure the delivery of “culturally appropriate” meals to Muslim prisoners. Military personnel uniformly refer to their task as “the mission.” In the camps, the
adhan,
the call to prayer, is broadcast five times a day. I watched from a guard tower one morning before daybreak as a group of twenty detainees assembled quietly and knelt toward
qibla,
the direction of Mecca. Their rhythmic chant was still in my ears when I entered the military mess hall at Camp America a few minutes later. A flat-screen TV dominated the wall at each end. One screen showed CNN. The other showed an evangelical preacher delivering a homily. Soldiers listened as they ate. When I sat down for breakfast with the guards who had been with me in the tower, they bowed their heads in silent prayer before cutting into their pancakes. They, like their captives, have God on their minds, if not on their side. These two religions of the book seem to have arrived at something of an impasse.