by JEANNE THEOHARIS
Pale and gaunt, he stood there, having endured three years of pretrial solitary confinement. “Alhamdullilah,” he said.
Yes. He had allowed an acquaintance to stay with him in his student apartment in London—an acquaintance who had raincoats, ponchos, and waterproof socks in his luggage, which the acquaintance later delivered to Al Qaeda.
One day before his case was set to go to trial, nearly four years after he had been arrested, Syed Fahad Hashmi, a U.S. citizen, accepted a government plea bargain on one count of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorism.
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Special Administrative Measures come directly from the attorney general. Used pretrial, they seem to be reserved for Muslim defendants. On May 31, 2009, as Hashmi sat in isolation, Scott Roeder, a Christian militant, walked into a Wichita church and shot and killed an abortion doctor—an act of premeditated murder. Some anti-abortion activists celebrated and wrote to Roeder in jail. Some even came to visit. Roeder was not put under SAMs. Meanwhile, Fahad received his first punishment, for “unauthorized gestures” and insubordination, after he practiced martial arts in his cell. He lost his limited family visits for three months.
On January 23, 2009, the day after President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting torture and ordering the prison at Guantánamo closed, Fahad’s defense challenged his SAMs for the second time, citing extensive scholarly and medical evidence that long-term solitary confinement and sensory deprivation damage a person’s mental and physical health. Citing the martial-arts incident and continuing threat to national security, the judge rejected the argument, and over the next three years, 30 more appeals. Attorney General Eric Holder renewed Fahad’s SAMs in October 2009.
The use of torture and other human-rights violations in America’s war on terrorism has been framed as a problem occurring largely outside our shores. Our public conversation blames a set of bad guys—the “torture lawyers” John Yoo and Jay Bybee and their patrons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney—who twisted the law to allow “enhanced interrogation” in secret and offshore locations.
But enhanced-interrogation techniques are only one facet of the human-rights devolution in the aftermath of September 11. In a campaign against terrorism that requires evidence of the effectiveness of law enforcement, a record of conviction is paramount. Prosecuting alleged terrorists has significant cachet for politically aspiring U.S. attorneys, not to mention financial imperatives as various government agencies compete for money made available to fight terrorism. Under the cover of law, U.S. attorneys use prolonged solitary confinement and sensory deprivation to help produce convictions. As John McCain, a former POW, wrote, such treatment “crushes the spirit.”
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