That night, Olshansky didn’t want to talk about Guantanamo. We know about Guantanamo. The domestic fuss, the international scandal, and the dismay of allied governments have worn down the Bush Administration. Now everyone, even President Bush, wants to close it. Olshansky was worried about the other prisons, places less famous and places completely secret, where a still unknown number of people are locked up without being charged, without access to a lawyer, and without trial.

Prisons Less Famous, with Worse Conditions

Less famous prisons may hold as many as 1000 men. On a recent trip to Afghanistan, Olshansky heard estimates that roughly 630 men are locked inside wire mesh pens at Bagram Air Force base , under the control of the U.S. military. It was the London office of Amnesty International that learned, in September of 2005, that the U.S. was sending people captured around the world to Bagram. It was also transferring prisoners from Guantanamo to Bagram. Olshansky said that the U.S. is building a new 40-acre prison facility there, which could hold about 1200 people. She said that U.S. interrogators at Bagram purposely deprive men of sleep for days before questioning them, that some prisoners have suffered frostbite, and that some have been beaten to death.

Another less famous prison is Policharki Prison, east of Kabul. The United States built its new Block D to house people seized by U.S. authorities, many transferred from Bagram Air Force base. Block D’s commanders, guards, and staff are American. The U.S. military, however, insists that the prisoners there are in the custody of the Afghan government. It says that prisoners there cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Some prisoners at Bagram who had filed habeas corpus petitions in federal court were abruptly moved to Policharski’s Block D. About 300 men are now imprisoned there.

Secret Prisons, Conditions Unknown

Secret prisons hold an unknown number of people. Olshansky said that she had learned about two detention facilities, one in Morocco, the other in Ethiopia. Of course, The Associated Press , the Guardian newspaper (London), and many others have reported the CIA’s use of foreign prisons and even U.S. naval ships to detain and interrogate people. Olshansy asked, if we don’t even know where those people are locked up, how can we insist that they are treated decently, are allowed to meet with the International Red Cross, are given access to lawyers, and are either expeditiously charged and tried or released?

Action

"There are too many ways to count," said Olshansky. She suggested teaching basic civil liberties to children, writing letters to newspapers, getting town and city governments to pass resolutions, meeting with Congressional representatives, insisting that every profession stick to high ethical standards, and demonstrating. After a question from the audience (me), she said that she admired Cory Doctorow’s book about the "War on Terror" for young people, Little Brother . She said, "Buy copies of it for school libraries!"

The next Administration will have to decide how to handle the hundreds of imprisoned men, women, and children bequeathed to it by the Bush Administration. During the Presidential campaign, we can insist that the candidates take a stand on in favor of the ghost prisoners and against the American gulag archipelago.

A note on Olshansky’s career: In 2004, she worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) . In Rasul v. Bush , she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that the Guantanamo prisoners had the legal right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. The Justices ruled in favor of the prisoners, 6-3. That ruling made possible the large effort that followed by lawyers and activists to dig out and question the evidence against the prisoners and to challenge the U.S. military’s physical mistreatment of them. It was a dramatic victory. It helped make Olshansky famous among U.S. lawyers.

Today, 54 years after the Korematsu decision, Covington partners are again paying for the representation of despised, supposed enemies of U.S. national security. Fallkoff represents 17 men locked up in Guantanamo. The first time he went there, he said, he was surprised to learn that his client had written him a poem. More poems followed. Falkoff had, in addition to his law degree, a Ph.D. in Literature. Poems piqued his curiosity. He began to wonder how many other prisoners were writing poetry. It turned out, several were. Possibly many. He conceived the idea of collecting and publishing those poems. The military officers running Guantanamo, however, disapproved. They disapproved of the project and of the poems themselves. One intelligence officer intoned, “Poetry represents an enhanced national security threat.”

Ho, what happy words for protest poets ’round the world! Byron writing on behalf of the Greeks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning scribbling stanzas for the Italians, and so many others seeking through verse the liberation of their fellows longed for the effectiveness that the U.S. Pentagon fears. The mighty quake before the slender pen of the poet!

At least, the mighty quake before the possible disapproval of their superiors.

Falkoff was able, after months of negotation with military censors, to publish an 84-page volume, Poems from Guantanamo. The poems appear in English. The authors wrote their poems in Arabic, Pashto, and English. The original Arabic and Pashto texts don’t appear in the book, though. The censors were afraid that they might contain coded messages.

The Guardian (U.K.) ran a review of the book last year. Falkoff read one of the poems for us that night, “Death Poem,” by Jumah al Dossari:

Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors or peace.”

Fallkoff said that he donates all the revenues from the book’s sales to the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The CCR is a non-profit law firm in New York that takes on human rights cases. It was CCR lawyers who first won for the Guantanamo prisoners the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court. Take a look at the book. You can consider donating a copy to your local library.

That night, Raut spoke in a History Department auditorium. He looked like an expensive, East Coast attorney : dark suit, tasteful tie, erect posture. He spoke politely. So moderate, so controlled, so reasonable. His presentation was almost dull. Note that this fellow went to Harvard Law School, worked for the Federal Trade Commission, and then worked at Weil, Gotshal, an expensive New York law firm. Now he works for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee. He is so square! Fire flickers somewhere underneath the conservative suit, though; he was one of the first corporate lawyers to volunteer to represent the Guantanamo prisoners in 2004.

He said, in his reasonable lecture-hall voice, that his top priority was to dispel three myths. Many Americans think that the Guantanamo prisoners are “the worst of the worst.” That is, the toughest, most murderous terrorists that the U.S. has been able to vacuum out of Al Qaeda hidey-holes around the world. As it turns out, no. They’re not. The Defense Department itself has figured out that over half of the men and boys locked up at Guantanamo never engaged in any “hostile act” whatsoever against the U.S.

Okay, so why are they there? Myth number two, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners had been captured on the battlefield, shooting or launching missiles at Americans and their allies. As it turns out, no. They weren’t. Only 5 percent of them were captured on a battlefield. Many of the others were seized by Afghan tribesmen who handed them in to Afghan or U.S. officials in return for a bounty. The bounties ranged up to $4000, many times the annual income of an entire Afghan extended family. How did the Afghans choose whom to seize? That’s hard to say. Many of their prisoners were non-Afghans–people who found themselves in Afghanistan with no relatives to vouch for them or protect them.

Surely the Guantanamo prisoners didn’t make it all the way to Cuba without having plotted, collaborated, stolen, spied, or acted reprehensibly in some way? Myth number three, Raut said, was that the Guantanamo prisoners must have been guilty of something. As it turns out, no. Many weren’t. One of Raut’s clients had been found locked in a cell of a Taliban jail. U.S. soldiers interpreted imprisonment by the Taliban as association with the Taliban. Raut described this miserable fellow as “demonstrably innocent.” Once Raut was able to make the Army connect Dot A to Dot B, the Army released him. Raut described several other prisoners, some of whom the New York Times and other major papers had written about. One Pakistani man, a chicken farmer named Abdur Sayed Rahman, was arrested because his name sounded like “Abdur Zahid Rahman,” the Taliban’s deputy foreign minister. An Afghan man was arrested because his name sounded like the name of a former Taliban provincial governor. The American hearing officer at Guantanamo told this man that he needed to contact the former governor himself to unravel the mix-up; the Army wouldn’t do it. When the man pointed out that he was being held incommunicado in Cuba, thousands of miles from Afganistan, the officer told him that he would be allowed to write a letter. He could show his results to the officer at his next hearing, which would take place one year from then.

Why are millions of dollars being spent to truck, fly, and lock up so many men with little or no evidence against them? Raut said that the Army has a procedure, codified in field manuals, for deciding whether someone it has captured should be held or released. It developed this procedure in Vietnam, when officers recognized the importance of devoting scarce vehicles, cells, and interrogators only to likely Viet Cong guerrillas, not harmless villagers. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, however, soon after the attacks on September 11, 2001, explicitly ordered the U.S. Army to set aside that procedure. All suspects, he ordered, however and by whomever captured, should be held, transported, and interrogated. That order, Raut said, resulted in poor “quality control” of incarcerated suspects.

Yes, the U.S. been pestered by many quality-control defects during George W. Bush’s Presidency. Raut is an interesting fellow: legalistic and personally conservative, but determined to challenge the national disgrace of his time. He describes his motives in this essay for Salon that was published in January of 2007. More power to him.