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I don't know anyone who's been in Guantanamo. However, I've got two Lebanese friends who came within a hairsbreadth of a free ticket there, and their stories are both individually interesting and instructive, with regard to how enormous miscarriages of justice can happen to the best of people. They might also carry a warning about what happens when we let fear cloud our better judgement and hand power to not-so-good people.
The first of the two is Salam Zaatari. Since his story was well-enough publicized to have ended up in Salon and the New York Times, using his real name isn't a problem.
Salam is one of the writer/performers who founded the ground-breaking TV program "Shi-N-N" on the Lebanese channel al Jadid, or 'New TV'. If you've taken a look at the Urinal Sketch I posted a couple of weeks ago, Salam is the tall guy in the middle who can't last the two minutes it takes to empty his bladder without lighting up. Like most Lebanese, this is pretty much factual, which makes the sketch as a whole just barely improbable. Salam is one of the funniest and most talented professionals working in Lebanese TV today. He's also a born democrat (small d), and a man who finds every form of religious or ideological extremism both risible and distasteful. He's exactly the guy the US should be doing everything in its power to support, coddle, and nurture. Instead, we tried our damndest to lock him up and throw away the key.
How did this happen?
The most accurate answer to that question is probably the one that starts with 9-11 and draws a straight line all the way through the Bush Administration to today's headlines about European fury at NSA spying on its citizens and even its top leaders. Looked at this way, the case of Salam Zaatari was an early warning that this process was already going off the tracks. Or, working fine, depending on whose perspective you want to adopt.
When 9-11 happened, Salam, originally from Sidon, just south of Beirut, was an art student in Pittsburgh. In the weeks after the event, his family back in Sidon began to worry about his safety as they followed news reports of attacks and harrasment against Muslims (or suspected Muslims - the attacks were often absurdly misguided) in the US. By the end of October they convinced Salam to return to Lebanon until the situation improved.
That's where things went seriously wrong, beginning with Salam's own naive belief that he was just another traveler fighting for legroom in the croweded skies. Instead of spending his last night perparing for his upcoming arrest, incarceration and interrogation, he partied with his friends. The next day, as he told me recently, things were a more than a little foggy as he threw together his bags. As a result, he made the mistake that was to seal his fate: he forgot to empty a pocket in his backpack that contained some art supplies. Among the pens, pencils and other paraphenalia was an art knife, a kind of baby brother to the box cutters that had apparently been used by the 9-11 hijackers. He also packed some news clippings about 9-11 to show his family back in Lebanon. Art knife! News clippings!
As mistakes go, Salam made one other, at least in the eyes of the law: he booked a flight with a connection in Detroit, which has a large Arab-American community. This was later to be counted against him, as if passing through Detroit airport had now become evidence of collusion in a plot of some kind, by virtue of the community living around it.
That was the extent of Salam's contributions to his fate. All the rest was provided by the criminal enforcement (sic, IOW, read it as it appears) system, from John Ashcroft on down. The stage was now set: in a new perversion of the well-known crime known as 'driving while Black', Salam Zaatari was about to be arrested for 'flying while Arab'.
With all these 'incriminating' facts in his possession, Salam showed up the next morning - somewhat hung-over - at the airport. Ironically, had the system worked just a little better, he might have avoided his fate. Unfortunately, the machines failed to detect his art cutter. Had they done so, it might have been simply confiscated and tossed in the bin. When my children were little I so often forgot to remove my Swiss Army knife from my bag that my son was given the job of reminding me as we left the house, which saved me many expensive replacements. Unfortunately, my son wasn't traveling with Salam, who was now 'in possession of a weapon' at the gate, and had, presumably, made some attempt to evade detection of his 'weapon' at security. In other words, in the eyes of John Ashcroft and the law, Salam Zaatari had essentially exhausted any legal presumption of innocence. All the more, as his name 'proved' him to be a member of a suspect population.
For a more complete account of how Salam missed his plane and two months of planes after that, how he spent those two months in jail and in fear of his life from other prisoners, who took him to be an 'Arab terrorist', how the Bush administration attempted to prevent his release at all costs, and how - had they had their way - he very likely would have ended up in Gitmo instead of on Lebanese TV....for all that I recommend this account and this one.
Twelve years on, Salam displays no rancor whatsoever about his brush with the modern American security state. He hasn't been back to the US, however, since he's understandably concerned that he might be in for a rematch, given that the Obama Administration has strengthened, rather than reined in - the power of the US moukhabarat, or secret police. The problem is, in order to get out of jail at all, Salam had to accept a plea bargain involving pleading guilty to a charge of trying to board an aircraft with a 'weapon'. The alternative, according to what his lawyers told him at the time, was to rot in a cell for an unknown amount of time, then go to court on a not-guilty plea and hope not to be found guilty by a jury already under the influence of lurid accounts of his and similar cases which depicted would-be Arab terrorists finding ever-more-clever ways of smuggling weapons onto aircraft in order to carry out mass murder.
Salam Zaatari may feel no rancor, but, personally, I feel otherwise. It seems to me that his case exemplifies everything that has led us to the insane excesses of the NSA and the rest of the security state. Not to mention the persecution of the whistleblowers who have tried to warn us what was being done in the dark corners of that apparatus. I feel rancor because I was also naive, just like Salam. The morning after Barrack Obama's election I woke up thinking: 'Finally! Things will change now.' That's naivete on a scale far beyond anything Salam Zaatari was able to muster over a few too many beers the night before his ill-fated departure for Lebanon...via - instead of Detroit - 2 months of solitary confinement.
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