Wikileaks, the wiki for whistleblowers, has been bearing fruit lately. It’s posted a list of military equipment in Iraq, which we used to calculate how many pieces of government-issue body armor (446,500), grand pianos (1), paper shredders (787), and BMW 735s (1) the Pentagon has over there. The site has also released a copy of the military’s official guide to handling detainees, which includes detailed descriptions of how groups of detainees have been transported by plane, providing a new glimpse inside the flights that carried many of the Guantanamo prisoners from Afghanistan and generated the now-iconic images of shackled, goggled, masked, earmuffed, and gloved new arrivals at Camp X-Ray. The schematic below shows a sample seating configuration for 30 such detainees, AKA “cargo.” (To insure a more pleasant flight, guards were supposed to receive one hour of training in “Cross Cultural Communications/Verbal Judo.”)
Now Wikileaks has posted a copy of the 2004 Standard Operating Procedures guide from Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, a treasure trove of information about the detention center’s inner workings. Among the details: Upon arrival, detainees were subject to up to 30 days in solitary as part of a “behavior management plan” designed “to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.” Guards were prohibited from discussing “world events or history with detainees, or within earshot of detainees,” including “the situation in the Middle East [and] the destruction of the Space Shuttle.” Detainees who refused to eat or drink weren’t on a hunger strike, they were officially on a “voluntary total fast.” Wikileaks’ own analysis of the document and its 2003 version suggests that new rules were added in response to abuses. For instance, the 2004 manual specifies that “Haircuts will never be used as punitive action” and prohibits guards from using pepper spray on “spitters, urinators or water throwers.” And so on, for 238 pages. It’s fascinating, revelatory reading, and deserves further scrutiny. Meanwhile, a Gitmo spokesman tells the Washington Post not to take the manual at its word because “things have changed dramatically” there since 2004. Until a more current manual turns up, this one will have to do.
