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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: K.S.M.Â’S VACUUM CLEANER It would just be an oddity that the C.I.A. let Khalid Sheikh Mohammed design a vacuum cleaner while he was held in a secret prison, as the Associated Press reports, if not for two things: its reasons for allowing the project, and the secrecy that surrounds it. Both fall under the rubric of insanity. By the time of the vacuum project, K.S.M., the planner of the 9/11 attacks, had already been waterboarded a hundred and eighty-three times, and he and other prisoners had been moved from a black site in Poland to one in Bucharest, on their way to Guantánamo. The main, torture-laced interrogations were over, but the government would not bestir itself to actually try K.S.M. and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators for almost a decade. (He was captured in 2003, and his military-commission trial at Guantánamo is still in its preliminary phases.) “We didn’t want them to go nuts,” a former senior C.I.A. official told the A.P. Some detainees had gone nuts. A nice vacuum-cleaner blueprint helps keep you sane, apparently, if you are, like K.S.M., a mechanical engineer. (Saddam Hussein, for similar reasons, was allowed to tend to plants before he was executed.) One wonders if another sort of schematic—a multiple-count indictment, say, or a court calendar—might be a better instrument of intellectual challenge for the prisoners still at Guantánamo. Only six, out of a hundred and sixty-six, have had charges filed against them; the government has no plans to ever charge most of them, and half have been cleared for release. A hundred and four are on a hunger strike. (K.S.M., the man of the vacuum, is not.) As Emily Greenhouse notes in a post on the force-feeding of dozens of prisoners and its moral cost, a federal judge suggested on Monday that their situation is one the President can (and should) do more about than diagram speeches. When you keep prisoners indefinitely, you either give them puzzles or dream up ones you can wedge them into. The A.P. reported that the C.I.A. found a message K.S.M. tried to leave in a copy of a Harry Potter book—an officer had “tediously checked every page,” perhaps wondering what it would be like to conduct drone strikes with the help of the Marauder’s Map. And the A.P. noted that vacuum- cleaner designs are passed off as diagrams of military installations in Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana.” (“The AP was unable to determine whether Mohammed ever read the famous novel.”) We may never know if there is a message in K.S.M.’s vacuum cleaner or, perhaps more interesting, if it is a decent appliance: the A.P. was told by the C.I.A. that the drawings, “ ‘should they exist,’ would be considered operational files of the CIA — among its most highly classified category of government files — and therefore exempt from ever being released to the public.” That secrecy may be amusingly absurd when it comes to K.S.M. and his secret vacuum; it is toxically insane when it comes to the mass of prisoners at Guantánamo whose continued detention is a legal mystery. In a second federal- court ruling, issued Thursday, Judge Royce Lambert rejected the government’s claim that intrusive groin-area searches of prisoners before and after they saw their lawyers was just a response to the suicide at the base. (The prisoner who killed himself, Adnan Latif, had long been cleared for release, and may have been too aware of the insanity of his case.) Instead, Lambert wrote, it was a scheme “to deter counsel”—to place a maze of indignity between the lawyers and their clients. It wasn’t the first time the government had tried that. In a hearing last month, a lawyer for another prisoner had to fight to bring in pens. As Carol Rosenberg, of the Miami Herald, reported, “Protecting their use of pens was particularly relevant, he argued, before the prison declares, ‘They’ve got to write in crayon.’ ” Crayons and pictures of vacuum cleaners can be good ways to fill the time; they are less helpful in sketching something that looks like justice. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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