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"FacebookPinterest\n\n This week marks the 10th Anniversary of the arrival of the first alleged terrorists to a makeshift prison on the United States Naval Base at Guant\u00E1namo Bay, Cuba. The detention center has been a source of controversy ever since. Endless stories of prisoner abuse and torture, along with the politicization of the war on terror, continue to obscure the fate of the 171 detainees who remain inside. Jonathan Hansen is a professor of History at Harvard University, and his new book, Guant\u00E1namo: An American History, chronicles\u2014from Columbus to the American Revolution, 19th Century expansionism to the War on Terror\u2014what this sliver of land on the south side of Cuba tells us about the history of the United States.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: The central theme of the book seems to be how the impulses of each era of American history have been reflected in various episodes at Guant\u00E1namo Bay. Can you talk a bit about that?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: There's a tension I think that underlies who we are as a country that makes us both predatory and also extremely generous at the same time. Let me just begin with the Revolution. The American Revolution was not a revolution against empire; it announced the arrival of a new empire on the block that is the United States. You have people like Thomas Jefferson describing it as a liberal empire, a notion that is completely fraught with paradox and contradiction. You have universal moral and political aspirations on the one hand. On the other hand, you have unslakable appetite for land, labor, resources and markets. We first arrived at Guant\u00E1namo because we wanted to settle of all places, the Ohio and Mississippi river valleys.\n\nGQ: Because of trade routes?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: Jefferson looks out from Monticello, he looks down at the Virginia tidewater, he walks out the back and sees Guant\u00E1namo. If you want to harvest the resources of the American breadbasket, you have to control the Mississippi River, the port of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. But the Gulf of Mexico flows clockwise, entering through the Yucat\u00E1n Peninsula and exiting through the Florida Straight. And to control that entranceway you have to control the Caribbean, the biggest entrance passage of which is the windward passage, on which sits Guant\u00E1namo Bay in Cuba.\n\nGQ: What's the relationship between the Cuban government and the United States naval base at Guant\u00E1namo?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: It's been this nifty place where the United States doesn't have to contact anybody to do what it wants there. Anywhere else in the world, if we have bases in Germany or Japan, our consul has to talk to their consul, who then talks to the powers that be. That is not the case here. Thanks to the rupture of U.S.-Cuba relations in January 1961\u2014Eisenhower's last act\u2014we don't have to contact anyone. So Cubans actually know what the heck is going on there because they're surveilling us, but technically we don't contact them when we want to do something.\n\nGQ: You document how the Bush administration sprang into action to build a makeshift detention center at Guant\u00E1namo. The attraction to the naval base seemed to be an almost instinctive revulsion to due process. What do you think was the source of that?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: First of all, I don't know what the instinct was. But it was, you know, and forgive me for swearing\u2026\n\nGQ: Please, swear words are fine.\n\n Jonathan Hansen: Yeah, I know, it's GQ. So there was this mentality of You fucked with us. And so, we're going to fuck with you back. It was [Dick Cheney's legal counsel] David Addington's \"new paradigm.\" The old legal constraints that we had abided by historically don't apply here. And to me, that argument in the end is sort of logically identical to the terrorists saying, Okay we're going to go outside the law and commit terrorist acts. And we said we'll do it right back at you. For some reason [the Bush administration] concluded a legal response is not going to do the trick.\n\nGQ: But there must have been misgivings?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: One of the things I want you to note, [researching this book] I didn't go to a bunch of liberals. There was plenty of pushback among Republicans and plenty of pushback among career military people to these policies. Ann Wright [a former colonel who resigned from the Bush administration in opposition to the Iraq War] said again and again, this was a bad decision for the kids. Let's take politics out of it. The Bush Administration was exposing these people to potential war crime prosecution. Whether they're guilty of abuse or actually participating in the torture. This is a military after all where people, generally, do what they're told to do. And it was clear that they were allowed to beat the shit out of these guys, so they beat the shit out of them.\n\nGQ: Besides the physical violence, one of the most haunting examples of enhanced interrogation in your book is when the female interrogator tries to \"alienate\" a chained detainee \"from his Muslim religion\" through sexual humiliation. She stripteases, rubs her breasts on his back, and finally when all else fails, in rather convincing fashion, pretends to wipe menstrual blood on the detainee's face.\n\n Jonathan Hansen: Absolutely. In that case, wasn't it clear that there were three people who suffered? The [Army interpreter] who had to watch and tell the story, certainly the detainee, but also this female interrogator. Think of how pathetic it was. Because here's the thing, it doesn't work. You can find a few Bush Administration officials, and maybe a few others who say, torture works. But everybody else says it doesn't. So here she's carrying out this baloney and it's just totally abusive and who's as much a victim? She is. Exactly right.\n\nGQ: What should be done about the detention center? Does every global power just need some sort of gulag?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: It's a good question. You know I'm changing my tune on this right now because I'm so fed up with what's going on with Congress' inability to close it. But during the surge I was arguing that rather than close Guant\u00E1namo we should keep it open, expose what happened there, and fix it. There was a modicum of due process and journalistic transparency there. We should finish the job, rather than just say, close it, walk away, and me and my liberal friends get to say how great we are, we closed Guant\u00E1namo. I mean I still think it applies a little bit, but now I've just lost it on Guant\u00E1namo, and I'm arguing give the whole thing back.\n\nGQ: But the suggestion is President Obama could spearhead a truth process, find out what happened there in the last ten years, and then figure out what the best solution should be for the base?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: Our president obviously, and anyone could see this, isn't going to do that.\n\nGQ: Why not?\n\n Jonathan Hansen: He says the political support isn't there, but he should know of all people that political support is made, and you make it by making arguments in front of the public. And if you don't tell us what went on there, then we're going to say, because we like to forget, 'Oh it wasn't so bad,' or 'It was bad, but it was short-lived.' And that's not the way you go about galvanizing a public in a way that will allow you to make a tough political decision. I blame the Republicans in Congress. I blame the Democrats in Congress for being feckless. But I also do blame Obama for not doing the work necessary to fulfill one of the most solemn promises of his campaign."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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