Guantanamo BayGuantanamo BayThe purpose of this paper is to examine how being part of a stigmatized group contributes to prejudice and discrimination.The situation of the Guantanamo Bay detainees is being used to look at this issue. Global Security, an organization based in Virginia, issued a recent report in February 2006 indicating that there are currently 329 detainees being held there. The report goes on further to explain that ever since 2001, over 100 have been released, meaning they pose no threat to the United States. Furthermore, the prisoners have included two men in their late 80s and 90s, a 12 year old boy, and several other young teenagers. Detainees were originally held because of some suspected link between them and al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups. Since then, over many who have been detained for several years have been sent back to their homeland, proving their innocence. What would lead the United State’s troops to capture so many people that are obviously innocent?
In recent years there has been a stigma surrounding Muslims and middle-easterners here in the United States, and the United States’ forces fighting the War on Terror may be mindful of this stigma when holding these people as detainees on Guantanamo Bay. Researchers have said that stigmatized groups “frequently are targets of stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination.”(Jones, 2002, p. 16). Furthermore, according to Fox (as cited in Jones, 2002), people are naturally predisposed to “rapid fire reasoning” to help people make decisions in unsure circumstances about a person of an out-group (p.19). In this case, it would be the people of middle-eastern descent, who are stigmatized already. That may help to explain why U.S. forces and other troops may
react as victims to the stigma of the Middle East.
A second important aspect in the interrogations performed at Guantanamo Bay is the use of a system of identification that may be considered too difficult for both detainees and the interrogators ’i.e., the use of a system so intrusive that it sometimes makes an interrogation less than effective for the purposes of counterbalancing anti-terrorism efforts. In addition to the lack of a way to identify targets, there are still a number of limitations about a detainee’s ability to make decisions about his or her own safety’ as both a detainee and an interrogator.
A detainee can also choose not to show any identification to interrogators who are there to interrogate him and thus may experience the most difficulty in the interrogation. For example, a detainee who is a victim of persecution in Iraq may be unable to tell a interrogator about possible crimes of aggression committed by his own family, a person with whom he has shared intimate and intimate relations. It is also unclear whether, as a result of military action, individuals in the U.S. government or other international persons may be subject to interrogation at any particular location. For these reasons, detention at Gitmo is a highly unusual program with unique training and security concerns. In spite of these concerns, U.S. troops and American civilians are subjected to training and security measures that can enhance this and other interrogations.
Although the detention of individuals is not always complete, some detainees who are treated inappropriately or subjected to serious misbehavior may be able to recover information from interrogators. A recent study on a detainee in the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Florida, found that his use of the term torture during interrogations with the purpose of documenting and interrogating those who have misbehaved was not inconsistent with the detainees’ ability to make informed but reasonable decisions about his actions and those who would make those decisions. While this study was conducted without outside security, the use of different methods of collecting information on detainee has been documented. (A recent study on detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Florida—and another at other Guantánamo Bay prisons—revealed that detainees subjected to severe physical and mental torture were more likely to make informed but reasonable plans to make informed or reasonable plans about their own behavior. The study is available from the American Journal of Human Rights.)
Of course, all of these caveats are part of the larger security issue of Guantanamo Bay. It is important to note that while many U.S. troops conduct security work there, more often than not, members are detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison than on any other land outside the government’s range of control—for example, in Libya and Afghanistan. For those who refuse to comply with detention as a matter of human rights law, that does little to protect their liberty and dignity.