The XX Factor: What women really think.

Phil Carter Departs from Pentagon

Phil Carter is a longtime contributor to Slate and a personal friend to many of us at the magazine. He also served in the Obama administration as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy, dealing chiefly with issues relating to the closure of Guantanamo Bay. It was reported last night that he has left that position for "personal and family reasons." Despite some speculation that this was a smokescreen for a break with the administration, we have heard from several sources that there is just no story there; Carter indeed left for personal reasons. We wish Phil and his family the best and thank him for his years of service, in the military as well as in Washington.

Don't Close Guantanamo

Great job, Obama! You've finally succeeded in getting somebody else to take some of those Guantanamo detainees off your hands. Your masterful diplomacy, although strangely ignored by more than 100 of our petitioned allies, has swayed the tiny island country of Palau to generously take a small group of the least dangerous detainees. Perhaps also helpful was the mere fee of $200 million we're paying them, which—as the Wall Street Journal points out—is a practical $10,000 for every citizen of Palau. On the heels of that good news comes yet more: Saudi Arabia is willing to take almost 100 of the most dangerous detainees. Details of that negotiation still to come.

I can't help but wonder if the protesters who raged over America's abuse of detainees in Guantanamo will express the same level of outrage for... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Will Obama Miss His Own Guantanamo Deadline?

In the heady afterglow of Obama's inauguration, I accepted a bet from Ann Althouse. She bet that the president, in the end, would not fulfill his promise to close Guantanamo within a year, by next January. Testing my hope that Obama could be counted on, I bet that he'd come through. Now I'd say Ann is looking more prescient than I am.

The Red Cross on Torture

We knew, thanks to Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side, that the International Committee of the Red Cross called the Bush administration's treatment of certain detainees in CIA custody torture. Now we know, from the text of the ICRC's report leaked to writer Mark Danner, about the mountain of specifics behind that label. See here for Danner's shorter New York Times op-ed and here for his longer piece in the New York Review of Books.

The ICRC interviewed 14 high-value detainees in late 2006 at Guantanamo. The Red Cross points out that the "consistency" of their accounts "adds particular weight" to their credibility. Some details also match the stories of former British detainees who described what happened to them after release.

What repeats: a month of standing, arms over the head and shackled, in a frigid room with incessant noise. Little sleep. Face-slapping and head-smashing against walls. Doctors checking for vital signs during water-boarding. The ICRC also picks up on refinements. A towel around the neck of one detainee (Abu Zabaydah) during head-smashing turns into a plastic collar for detainees interrogated later. When Walid ben Attash is forced to stand shackled, the stump of his amputated leg hurts, and he kicks away his prosthesis. Then the pressure on his good leg increases, and he calls his captors to give him back his artificial limb. Afterward, they sometimes take away the prosthesis and then measure the swelling in the leg he has left to stand on.

In Israel in 1999, when a state report came out of the intelligence service's use of cruelly painful stress positions and sleep deprivation on Palestinian detainees, the country's Supreme Court essentially banned torture by forcing the government to plead a necessity defense for any interrogator who used it. Here and now, the Obama administration has forsworn water-boarding and is currently holding the CIA to the standards for interrogation of the U.S. military, which preclude the techniques in the ICRC report. But the government has left open what it will let the CIA do in the future, and at his confirmation hearing, CIA head Leon Panetta signaled that he is open to some harsher techniques, case by case.

Is it better for the executive branch to answer these questions itself, or for a court to step in, as Israel’s did? Does the leak of the ICRC report further the goal of truth-telling for the sake of telling, as Sen. Leahy has been arguing in favor of the truth commission he has proposed for the Senate judiciary committee? Or does knowing what happened mean wanting to know who exactly authorized it, at the highest levels? And then once we know that, how do we thread the president's needle of  “looking forward, not backward” and prosecuting the crimes we have evidence of? The questions are sharpening, not going away.

Gitmo Drama

Binyam Mohamed, the first Guantanamo detainee released by President Obama, flew back to his native Britain this week and, like many a former detainee before him, said the U.S. had tortured him. He used the adjective "medieval" to make sure to get his point across.

In a sense, this is useful for the Obama administration, as Attorney General Eric Holder travels to Guantanamo for military briefings about the 245 remaining detainees. Disturbing accounts like Mohamed's—though aspects of them can't be verified—spotlight all the problems with the Bush approach to the detainees, and all the reasons for Obama to deal with them differently and eventually to close Gitmo. And there's another kind of utility, as well: The attention to Mohamed and torture takes attention away from the dense, tricky legal questions on which the Obama lawyers have been siding with their Bush predecessors. So far, there's the new administration's defense of the state-secrets privilege in the case about extraordinary rendition and torture by the CIA, its quiet effort to dismiss the lawsuit demanding that Bush officials find 15 million e-mails missing from White House accounts, and the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Senatory Leahy's truth commission proposal. Mohamed's story is terrible, and also easier to make a headline out of.

Will Congress Help the Uighurs?

Another early test for Obama and the Democratic Congress on the war on terror front: The D.C. Circuit just stopped the release of the poor beleagured Uighurs, 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees whom the Bush administration admitted posed no threat but refused to let go. A district court had ruled in favor of releasing the men, saying that the president had no legal basis for detaining them. No threat, no detention—seems right. The problem is that it's not clear where the Uighurs should go. They're from a remote northwestern area of China. They're not fans of the Chinese government, and the government hates them right back. Which means they're at risk of torture if we send them home, according to both the government and their lawyers. That means that our government either has to look for another country to bear the brunt of China's anger by agreeing to take them—a deal that apparently hasn't gone well for Albania, which took five other Uighur detainees three years ago—or release them inside the United States.

Why not repatriate the Uighurs here, if the government has determined they're not dangerous? Today's court decision doesn't argue against doing that. Instead, it's about separation of powers. The D.C. Circuit said that a district court can't order the release of an alien from Gitmo without authorizing legislation from Congress. OK, Congress, are you going to move on this? And will the Obama administration support such a bill?

Graphic Pictures, Blurry Lines

The Toronto Star has an extremely graphic photo (h/t How Appealing and Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald) of Omar Khadr, the 21-year-old Canadian at Guantanamo Bay, apparently being treated by U.S. soldiers after being injured in a firefight. In a sidebar. the editor of the Star explains his decision to print the “brutal image” and scolds the Canadian government for its “failure to follow the lead of Britain and Australia, which demanded the repatriation of their citizens to face due process at home.” Khadr was 15 at the time of his capture in Afghanistan and he is, at least periodically, on trial at Gitmo for allegedly throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. Human rights organizations worldwide have condemned the U.S. for failing to distinguish between child and adult soldiers.

The accompanying excerpt from the Toronto Star’s Michelle Shephard’s upcoming book about Khadr's life describes Damien Corsetti, one of the interrogators at Bagram who “had been given little training and lots of responsibility.” Having “logged more than 3,000 hours in the interrogation booths,” Corsetti was eventually charged with beating and sexually humiliating a detainee at Bagram. But in 2006 Corsetti was acquitted and given an honorable discharge. His lawyer’s defense strategy? He “portrayed Corsetti as a foot soldier led by a commander who demanded results at any cost: "The President of the United States doesn't know what the rules are. The Secretary of Defence doesn't know what the rules are. But the government expects this Pfc. (private first class) to know what the rules are?"

This weekend President Bush vetoed the Congress’ attempt to clarify the rules for CIA interrogators. Because when nobody knows where the line between aggressive interrogation and genuine torture lies, the only one left to blame for the cruel treatment of prisoners is the detainees themselves.

AIDS at Guantanamo?

On the legal front this week, we have Michael Mukasey's can't-pin-me-down testimony of yesterday, as Dahlia reported. And also this dismaying report, via his lawyer and the LA Weekly's blog, that a Guantanamo prisoner has contracted AIDS in the camp. If this is true, it's an awful example of the individual harms the Bush administration has caused with its grim insistence that the rule of law and the war on terror shall not mix.