A Devil's Island for Our Times
It is time to invade Cuba and put an end to what has become another Devil's Island in the annals of government-sanctioned torture. The barbaric treatment of political prisoners on the island is made no more palatable by being conducted in the name of an ideology that claims to be liberating the world from its shackles.
Once again, we are witnesses to the ugly truth bound up in that philosophical contradiction that the ends can justify the means: Desecrations of the human body and spirit can never be righteously justified by high-minded appeals to the needs of the masses. Fortunately, a few brave U.S. intelligence agents have managed to penetrate the security of a morally repugnant Cuban gulag and documented both the barbaric acts occurring on the island and their state-sanctioned rationalizations.
"On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water," wrote an FBI agent who gained access to the prison compound. "Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more."
Also reported by U.S. agents: freezing or very hot cells; feverish prisoners left untreated; loud music and strobe lights directed for long periods at prisoners in solitary confinement; growling dogs used to frighten prisoners.
The prisoners themselves have testified to even worse tortures, their stories smuggled out by lawyers after they had been held incommunicado for years. Beatings that ended in injury and even death. Forced sex acts, often videotaped for use as blackmail. Coerced confessions. Injections of unknown drugs. The prisoners' claims were so outrageous that many of their attorneys did not believe the stories until U.S. government documents corroborated key aspects.
"Now there is no question that these guys have been tortured," said Brent Mickum, a Washington attorney for one of the roughly 10% of detainees at the camp who have finally secured legal representation. "Every allegation that I've heard has now come to pass and been confirmed by the government's own papers."
Even more troubling is that the FBI agents make it clear this is not the work of a few poorly supervised sadists. Their reports refer to what they described as a new -- and very much secret -- executive order on prisoner treatment by the president at the top of the camp's chain of command, which allowed for severe interrogation tactics, including "sleep deprivation and stress positions" combined with "loud music, interrogators yelling at subjects and prisoners with hoods on their heads."
