Migrant Torture at Guantanamo Authorized by Trump Administration Memo

If you haven't been to Gitmo, you might not recognize the implications of a brief reference in a recently revealed Pentagon/Homeland Security document

Edited by Sam Thielman

WHILE I WAS AWAY, CBS News acquired and reported on a memorandum of understanding between the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security on shared responsibilities over the expanded migrant-detention camps at Guantanamo Bay. 

Appropriately, CBS' Camilo Montoya-Galvez led with and focused on how the March 7 memo gave the lie to the Trump administration's assertions that only the "worst of the worst" migrants with criminal backgrounds would be caged at Guantanamo. The Pentagon and DHS memo defines a "nexus to a transnational criminal organization" broadly enough to ensnare anyone who paid such an entity to be smuggled into the United States. Such organizations often exploit those migrants, and accordingly, the Guantanamo arrangement outlined in the memo collapses the difference between predator and prey. Mass deportation obviously becomes easier when the government can portray millions of people as Tied To A Transnational Criminal Organization. 

And it's worth recognizing that Montoya-Galvez and others have very admirably inserted a greater and earlier skepticism about the government's pronouncements than did the 9/11 generation of journalists (i.e., mine). It took several years before mainstream news outlets began doubting that most of those caged at Guantanamo were actually the dangerous men that the Bush administration falsely portrayed. This piece appeared within the Second Trump Administration's first hundred days.

But another aspect of this memo deserves some additional attention. It appears relatively innocuous at first glance. But if you've been to Guantanamo Bay, you know immediately how it authorizes treatment that in practice amounts to torture. 

I'm talking about this line, found at section 4.2.2. It says that the Defense Department, via U.S. Southern Command, the military command that oversees Guantanamo, 

Will provide DHS/ICE with soft structures (tents) to hold other NSGB IAs. [In context, that means other than "high threat" IAs, i.e., low-threat "illegal aliens." NSGB means Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.] These tents do not have power, lighting, heating/air conditioning.

I've been to Guantanamo Bay three times. At this time of year—and two of those visits occurred at this time of year—Guantanamo is baking hot. I mean it's hotter than I have experienced during this time of year in Baghdad. You feel like you're in a furnace, and the summers are even worse. You need to hydrate frequently, if not constantly.

And what you really need is air conditioning. 

On two occasions when I was at Guantanamo, press were housed in a "soft structure" tent not unlike what this memo outlines. (The first time was before those tents were set up.) The tents weren't exactly comfortable, but they were mercifully kept cold—powerfully cold. Those reading this who've worked in restaurants: it's like stepping into the walk-in on the hottest day of the year. If the tents didn't have air conditioning, they would have been unbearable. I don't mean "uncomfortable," the kind of discomfort that, were someone so inclined, they could rationalize as par for the course for a detention camp. I mean unbearable.

Now, according to Carol Rosenberg, dean of the Guantanamo press corps, writing about two weeks before CBS, 195 tents that the Pentagon constructed at Guantanamo in the expanded camp have yet to be used, and right now, the migrants held at Guantanamo are held in the extant migrant and wartime-detainee buildings. So it would appear this policy memo hasn't yet been put into place, much like the announced construction of the expanded tent camps has stalled. But as a matter of policy to manifest going forward, these tents are intended to be absolutely stifling. They will also not have lighting. So not only will they be unbearably hot, migrants will have to endure the heat in total darkness.

I can tell you that the tents I stayed in at Guantanamo Bay were also quite dark once you switched off the installed fluorescent lights. I am at the moment writing a book about someone who had to endure a very long period of time in a CIA black site known as the Dark Prison, which was swelteringly hot and pitch dark. It was impossible not to think of that experience when reading this provision in the March memo. 

The memo doesn't authorize waterboarding, stress positions, or similar "enhanced interrogation techniques" that all but War-on-Terror dead-enders recognize as torture. But make no mistake. "Environmental manipulation"—extreme temperatures—and "sensory manipulation"—enforced darkness, for instance—were both torture techniques used by the Defense Department (and the CIA) earlier in the War on Terror, at Guantanamo and beyond. 

Now, in bland and bureaucratic terms, they are set to be put into effect again, this time for people whose crime was to seek a better life in America, much as the ancestors of the architects of this memo did. Even while attention is appropriately focused on the dire situation for migrants rendered to El Salvador's CECOT prison, CBS quoted a Pentagon spokesperson saying that 42 migrants are presently caged at Guantanamo. 

Someone whom I guarantee you knows exactly what it means to pen people in Guantanamo with no air conditioning? Former Gitmo guard and current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. 

Two other aspects of the memo are worth flagging on similar grounds. First, at section 4.1.15, it grants DHS and ICE responsibility for "any involuntary medical treatment, including in response to hunger strikes, or similar measures." That means enteral feeding, the forced insertion of tubes through the nose and down the throat, through which liquified food will pass. That is also torture, as anyone who has experienced it will tell you. Perhaps you watched the episode of the FX adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe's excellent book Say Nothing where Dolours and Marion Price are forcibly tube-fed, including by medical staff who don't disguise taking pleasure from it. If not, it's a good time to check that one out. 

Second, and for this part I admit the context raises more questions for me than answers, at 4.1.4, there is a vague reference to "mandatory work for detained aliens." I don't know what that means, since ICE's style of prison labor is unknown at Guantantamo, but it's ominous, and I'm going to try to get answers for a future edition. 

AS I WAS RETURNING TO NEW YORK THIS WEEKEND, videos spread on social media of mobs of pro-Israel Brooklynites harassing and beating women who were—or who were mistaken for—protesting the appearances of fascist Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir in Crown Heights and Gravesend. 

“They were shouting at me, threatening to rape me, chanting ‘death to Arabs.’ I thought the police would protect me from the mob, but they did nothing to intervene," she said.

I have to note that thus far I have not seen anyone refer to these as wilding incidents. If you're a New Yorker of a certain age, you know what I'm talking about. 

There's a lot more to say about this, especially as a Brooklyn Jew. I'll be recording a podcast episode for Zeteo about it alongside a highly respected Palestinian colleague in the very near future. Watch that space.

THE ARMS-INDUSTRY WATCHDOGS AT SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, report that last year saw an astonishing 9.8 percent increase in global military spending, which it says is "the steepest year-on-year rise since at least the end of the cold war." SIPRI researcher Xiao Liang commented with significant understatement that "as governments increasingly prioritize military security, often at the expense of other budget areas, the economic and social trade-offs could have significant effects on societies for years to come." (Interestingly, an exception to the global rise in military spending is Iran, whose expenditures, due to sanctions, "fell by 10 per cent in real terms to $7.9 billion in 2024 despite its involvement in regional conflicts and its support for regional proxies.") We don't have time for this. 

LET'S HANG OUT THIS WEEKEND. On Saturday, for Free Comic Book Day, I'll be signing IRON MAN (and, if you want, REIGN OF TERROR and WALLER VS. WILDSTORM) at the excellent independent and black-owned bookstore Taylor & Co on Cortelyou Road, just east of Coney Island Ave., in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Come through, hang out, pick up some free comics, and—especially—buy some of the excellent books and comics that Andrew stocks on Taylor & Co's august shelves. The point of Free Comic Book Day is to show these crucial community spaces some support. I hope I'll see you on Saturday. 

I hope everyone's preordering IRON MAN Vol. 1: The Stark-Roxxon War, our first trade paperback collecting issues 1 through 5. That's out on June 24—a date worth saving, since from 6-8pm that day, I'll be signing it at Crown Heights' finest, Anyone Comics. That's going to feature a Q&A, but show up and we'll just talk about whatever. And just like on FCBD, make sure you spend some cash on the quality comics that Demetrios stocks at Anyone.