What Maggie should have said

It's textbook news management: with the country distracted by Johnny Carson's death and bad weather in the northeast, the Pentagon lets slip that things at the pre-Magna Carta Guantanamo Bay detention centre are worse than we thought:

Twenty-three terror suspects tried to hang or strangle themselves at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay during a mass protest in 2003, the military confirmed Monday.

And what name keeps coming up in all these prison scandals?

The incidents came during the same year the camp suffered a rash of suicide attempts after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller took command of the prison with a mandate to get more information from prisoners accused of links to al-Qaida or the ousted Afghan Taliban regime that sheltered it.

That man again, General Miller. Anyway, it's essential for the Pentagon that suicide attempts not become an index of the impact of indefinite detention on the mental state of the prisoners, so some jargon must be found to describe the underlying behaviour here:

Between Aug. 18 and Aug. 26, the 23 detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves with pieces of clothing and other items in their cells, demonstrating "self-injurious behavior," the U.S. Southern Command in Miami said in a statement. Ten detainees made a mass attempt on Aug. 22 alone.
U.S. Southern Command described it as "a coordinated effort to disrupt camp operations and challenge a new group of security guards from the just-completed unit rotation."

Note the double spin implied in the attempts being seen as rational decisions to disrupt the prison, and not evidence of people driven to their wits end by open-ended detentions. Now with our Irish interests we can't help but see parallels to the 1981 hunger strikers in Northern Ireland, and indeed the fact that we haven't heard much about hunger strikers at Gitmo probably just means that the Pentagon is covering them up, since the Irish example shows how devastating a public relations tactic it can be. Maggie Thatcher never could get her no compromise attitude to the hunger strikers to play well in Ireland, with the electoral rise of Sinn Fein as one of the long-term consequences.

But poor Maggie didn't have access to the Pentagon spin machine to squelch the revolt -- a news blackout on the prisoners and coy references to "self-injurious behaviour" if anything bad did leak out. One wonders if the Pentagon has done its own research on the potency of the tactic, in which case they would have encounted the long Irish experience with it; Terence MacSwiney, then Lord Mayor of Cork, died in 1921 in Brixton Prison, London, on day 74 of his hunger strike, and a famous line from his mayoral inauguration speech made it to the history books: "It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer". A much better line than any in some other piece of sh*t inauguration speech that was delivered recently.

By the way, one prominent convert to the anti-torture cause has, so far as we can tell, made no reference to the mental harm to prisoners resulting from indefinite detentions. No memos, no photographs, no story.

UPDATE Jan 27: Welcome Sullywatch readers! [kindly directed to the section immediately above by SW] But seriously, in what looks like another piece of evidence that Sully does read Sullywatch, Sully actually does mention the indefinite detentions issue today, in the context of the four Britons released from Gitmo. Nothing on their mental health, though, or that of the detainees still in Gitmo. But once again, the Sully concerned about indefinite detentions is the New Sully, because there are old posts like this:

[June 2002] Excellent skewering of civil liberties hysteria in the case of Jose Padilla by Rich Lowry in NRO. Much of this debate rests, methinks, on the deeper question of whether we really are at war. If we are, then detaining enemy combatants, even American citizens, is constitutional. If not, what on earth is that big hole in the ground in Manhattan?

To mimic his Shakespearian usage: Enter War on Terror. Exeunt Habeas Corpus, Magna Carta.