June 21, 2006

The Pentagon's expulsion of U.S. reporters from Guantanamo Bay is a crude effort to shield the notorious detention facility from public scrutiny.

After the suicide deaths of three prison detainees on June 10, the Pentagon rescinded all press access to Guantanamo, and it sent reporters from the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald and Charlotte Observer back home.

Most detainees at the U.S.-run Naval base have been imprisoned and cut off from the world for more than four years without being formally charged with a crime. Some are likely guilty of nothing more than being swept up in the vast post-9/11 dragnet.

Detainees have endured harsh and inhumane imprisonment and interrogations, and in some cases have reportedly been told by prison authorities that they will be at Guantanamo forever.

In recent months, a number of detainees have protested their treatment by engaging in hunger strikes to the point of being hospitalized and force-fed through nasal tubes. There have also been other unsuccessful suicides attempts, most notably in 2003, when 23 prisoners engaged in a mass hanging.

The prison hospital reportedly dispensesnearly a thousand pills a day to treat anxiety, depression and other inmate ailments.

It's been news reporters who have made many of the horrific details public. They have gotten their stories out in spite of military restrictions that hamstring efforts by censoring their photographs and prohibiting them from interviewing detainees.

When asked about the naval base at a recent press conference, President Bush said that he'd "like to close Guantanamo. But I also recognize that we're holding some people that are darned dangerous."

But if it's true that the Guantanamo detainees are dangerous individuals with connections to al-Qaida and the Taliban, then the administration shouldn't hesitate to allow the prisoners and the public an opportunity to weigh the evidence against them.

Instead, the administration is doing everything it can to limit the detainees' legal rights and to restrict -- if not eliminate -- press oversight and public accountability.

If the Naval base at Guantanamo is "the most transparent detention facility in the history of warfare," as Pentagon spokesman Navy Lt. Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon recently described it, then the U.S. government should stop acting as if it has so much to hide.

The suicides at Guantanamo Bay demand more press scrutiny and public accountability, not less.

Andrea Lewis, is a San Francisco-based journalist and co-host of "The Morning Show" on KPFA Radio in Berkeley, Calif. She can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.