US penal culture baffles its allies

It is hard to imagine how disoriented the new inmates of Camp X-Ray must feel as they sit staring from their Guantanamo Bay cages. They signed on to fight a holy war in the dry mountains of Afghanistan, but have ended up in a sweaty corner of a tropical island on the other side of the world, being fed bagels and cream cheese a few strips of razor wire away from one of the world's last outposts of communism.

It is a truly surreal scene, but it is easy to see the attractions of Guantanamo Bay in the eyes of the Pentagon. It is an enclave solely inhabited and controlled by the US military. There are sharks on one side and Fidel Castro's regime on the other.

For a prison population (totalling 110 by the end of last week) made up of Islamic extremist fighters, some of whom have already staged a bloody prison uprising in Afghanistan, and who have vowed to take their American guards with them to martyrdom, it is near-perfect.

However, conditions at Camp X-Ray have drawn criticism from human rights groups and concern from some of Washington's European allies, who have deplored the use of cramped cages with chain-link walls that leave the inmates exposed to the heat, mosquitoes and cool, damp nights of the Caribbean. The marines in charge at Gitmo, as they call the century-old naval base, have angrily retorted that the captives are enduring conditions no worse than those endured by American soldiers - a basic requirement of the Geneva convention.

But therein lies another source of friction. The Pentagon has refused to designate its captives as "prisoners of war", a category entitling them to protection under the Geneva convention. By avoiding the phrase, the US has been able to portray such standards of treatment as a privilege, not a right.

A visiting delegation from the international committee of the Red Cross will issue a report on the camp's facilities in the next few days, potentially provoking a showdown with Washington. However, the Guantanamo row has already laid bare a representative cross-section of the tensions that continually dog relations between the US and even its best friends abroad.

First, the US attitude towards the application of the Geneva convention reflects a "pick and mix" approach towards international treaties in general. Despite President George Bush's appeal for a global campaign against terrorism, his administration shows as much impatience as ever at the irritating constraints of collective security.

Second, there is a growing feeling abroad that the extreme security-first approach on display in Guantanamo is symptomatic of America's exclusive focus on the well-being of its soldiers at the expense of those who might get in their way. That steep trade-off was on display in the Kosovo conflict, in which the number of civilian casualties was undoubtedly linked to the high altitude at which US bomber pilots were ordered to fly.

It was also apparent in the Pentagon's initial hesitancy in deploying special forces teams on the ground in Afghanistan to help pinpoint air raids and assess targets, again with inevitable consequences for the hapless Afghans.

The question that arises from these wars is what exactly is the rate of exchange between American and foreign lives? Or in the case of Guantanamo, what is the trade-off between the marine guards' security and the rights of the prisoners?

The debate has been phrased mainly in terms of Americans versus others, but that may serve only to obscure the underlying issues, which arguably run far deeper than nationality, and which were on show last week in a wood-panelled courtroom in Akron, Ohio. The inmates of that state's "supermaximum" security prison took its authorities to court for its harsh and arbitrary conditions, by comparison to which Camp X-Ray is veritably a Club Med.

Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners at Guantanamo Bay can at least see the world around them through the transparent walls of their pens, and for most it will only be a transitory stage between repatriation or jails elsewhere. By contrast, the prisoners at Ohio's "supermax" are kept 23 hours a day in steel boxes under permanent artificial light. Even their one hour of recreation a day is spent alone in an indoor exercise room. Some go months without seeing the sky and many spend years in solitary confinement. More than one prisoner in court spoke of the sensation of being consigned to a "tomb".

The justification for this draconian regime is - as in Guantanamo Bay - the security of the guards. It is true that some inmates are dangerous psychopaths. But they are a minority. The political fad for building supermax prisons in the 80s and 90s (in many states it was a surefire winner on the campaign platform) has produced significant over-capacity, which has been used to take the overflow from ordinary prisons.

Supermax jails have been used as dumping grounds for the mentally ill and other difficult inmates. In the Ohio state penitentiary, a few of the most unstable prisoners had been known to throw urine or faeces at their guards. As a result, even the small cracks around every cell door have been closed with metal strips, sealing every inmate into a world of sensory deprivation.

Solitary confinement is used as a tool of control and punishment in European jail systems too, but not to nearly the same degree, and there are generally independent institutions in place to curb excesses. In the US there is a social and moral tradition underlying the judicial system by which those found guilty of egregious crimes are considered to have forfeited all their rights, including most notoriously their right to life. It as an important difference between US and European penal culture, and a constant source of mutual bafflement.

The same absolutist approach to retribution seen in Ohio has been exported to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. It is little wonder that Washington and its European allies fail to see eye to eye.

This article will also appear in Guardian Weekly