Things that make me crazy

i was driving back from a lunch meeting and listening to an interview on public radio international with two of the mothers of the american hikers that have been detained without charges for over a year in iran... the mothers had been allowed to visit their children in tehran in may and, at the time, made a direct appeal to the iranian government for their release without success...

nora shourd, the mother of sarah shourd, one of the detainees, was particularly distressed that her daughter had been kept in solitary confinement for most if not all of her time in prison and was suffering from severe loneliness and appeared to her to be clinically depressed... in so many words, mrs. shourd called her daughter's treatment torture and was appalled that, as a u.s. citizen, she could be subjected to such degradation and made to endure so much personal suffering when she had committed no crime...

as a parent, i would be equally outraged and absolutely beside myself with worry if one of my children was in a similar situation... in fact, i can't imagine any parent anywhere in the world who wouldn't feel the same... but i also couldn't help but think of the parents of all the detainees held by the u.s. in equally troubling circumstances, also without charges, not for one year, not for two years, not even for five years, but for seven, eight, nine and, for some, going on ten years... is anyone interviewing THOSE parents...? did the interviewer even mention that the u.s. is doing the very same thing, only a great deal more of it...? did the mothers bother to acknowledge that there are a lot of mothers around the world struggling with the same situation...? no... of course not...

makes. me. crazy.

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IHT headline: "Guantánamo drives prisoners insane"

ya know, sitting here in afghanistan offers a remarkable perspective on what's happening back home... things are bad here, no doubt about it, but when i catch myself thinking about how fortunate we are in the u.s. and then read something like this, it makes me physically ill...

Guantánamo drives prisoners insane, lawyers say

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."

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.

Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo's climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for insanity. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on U.S. prison conditions.

Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only "single-occupancy cells."

that last line is jaw-droppingly unbelievable for its arrogance if not its outright prevarication...

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