A return to Gitmo
By Molly Crabapple
After VICE published my previous piece about my first visit to Gitmo, "It Don't GITMO Better Than This," a Department of Defense spokesman phoned my editor, upset that I'd made him look like “a tool.” A former camp doctor, Monty Granger, sent me over 100 tweets calling me a “#pathetic #Islamist #apologist.”
I first came to Gitmo to cover the military commissions. During my second trip, I was the third artist granted permission to draw the prisons. The Joint Task Force offers journalists a carefully choreographed tour—the point of which is to show that the Bad Old Gitmo of public perception is not Gitmo Now.
Bad Old Gitmo existed from approximately 2002-2007. Its orange jumpsuits, water-boarding, detainees sleeping in what Granger, who served at Guantanamo in 2002, gleefully described as “dog kennels.” Its guards pummeling prisoners in revenge for September 11. Bad Old Gitmo, like so many icons of the Bush era, is Not Humane.
And “humane” is the catchword of Gitmo now.
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http://www.vice.com/read/guantanamo-bay-is-kafka-on-the-caribbean
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