It’s not a long trip

Lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners are concerned that confinement is driving the poor dears crazy according to the International Herald Tribune;

Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.

But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Hamdan, already the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, has essentially been driven insane by solitary confinement in a tiny cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”

“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lieutenant Commander Brian Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”

So how do they know he wasn’t completely unbalanced before he was put in Guantanamo? After all, he was driving a wanted criminal around the Middle East and engaged in sociopathic behavior long before he was captured. And what do they want us to do with him? Give him weekend passes unsupervised in Miami?

They claim that isolation in Guantanamo is worse than isolation in US prisons – how is that even possible? There are no degrees of isolation – there’s only isolation. Having spent a little time in isolation in a foreign prison myself, I have some experience in that.

Since it’s a lawyer’s job to get their client out of prison, I hardly blame them for yapping nonsense – I blame the media for giving them a bullhorn.

Category: Media, Terror War