One Long Night

INTRODUCTION

Sailing to Guantánamo

1. A DOUBLE-DECKER FERRY CARRIES visitors to the windward side of Guantánamo Bay naval base and drops them off at the bottom of a hill just short of Camp Justice. A handful of current and former detention sites with names like Camp Echo and Camp Delta cluster near the southeastern corner of the base, tucked behind chain link fences topped with loops of razor wire. Those facilities still in use hold a small number of detainees awaiting proceedings, as well as others who will never see their cases presented at Camp Justice.

The ferry docks at a utilitarian parking lot on Fisherman's Point, but the lot's bare pavement fails to reflect its storied history. In 1898, the US Marines landed here during the Spanish-American War, coming ashore the morning of June 10, setting fire to a seaside village and capturing the Spanish blockhouse perched above it before lunchtime. The hill became a wartime camp, then a permanent base, and US forces never left.

A bronze plaque embedded in a cairn of white stones by the water's edge commemorates an even earlier invasion. On Christopher Columbus's second voyage to the West in 1494, he visited Fisherman's Point, too, having already claimed Cuba for Spain. The plaque states that Columbus and his men were hunting for gold, but "not finding likely prospects they left the next day."

For more than four hundred years after Columbus's expedition, Cuba remained a Spanish colony. But in the 1890s, Spain created the world's first concentration camps on the island. The death toll unleashed by that decision eventually led to the loss of the colony, with US Marines coming ashore on the same spit of land where Columbus had stood centuries before.

Until a few years ago, I had no thought of traveling to Guantánamo. My interest lay in writing a history of concentration camps. Twenty-firstcentury detention at Guantánamo might have seemed disturbing, but it had not occurred to me to think of it as a concentration camp. The more time I spent researching mass arrests and detention, however, the more Guantánamo kept creeping back into view.

I couldn't imagine writing about the place without going there. And so in 2015, I made two visits. The first gave me a chance to observe pretrial hearings in the case of the five 9/11 defendants, who make an appearance in the last chapter of this book. Not being obliged to file a story on deadline, as other journalists on the trip were expected to, I opted to fill in for the absent sketch artist and absorb as much as possible in a courtroom custom-built for prisoners in the war on terror. Having arrived in the fifteenth year of an ongoing story, I wanted to catch up.

My second trip took me to the detention camps, or at least the ones that I was permitted to see. In both cases, setting foot on Guantánamo was like entering another world. The thousands of personnel and dozens of buildings that made up the machinery of detention for what was then a little over a hundred prisoners felt overwhelming. The issue that most troubled me—the legitimacy of holding untried suspects for more than a decade—was not the minute-to-minute concern of the soldiers and sailors who were busy doing their jobs. The big questions had been decided elsewhere. There the detainees sat, and there they would remain as long as those orders stood.

Yet after September 11, 2001, the US consecration of Guantánamo as an ideal site for extrajudicial detention had been greeted with the same international dismay elicited by Spain's inauguration of reconcentración—mass civilian detention—in 1896. In crucial ways, the twenty-first-century American detention camps at Guantánamo are descendants of the nineteenth-century Spanish camps. But there are many generations between them, each iteration carrying elements of the old while evolving into something new.

The history of concentration camps circles from Cuba around the world and back, visiting six continents and nearly every country along the way. Camps have been in existence continuously somewhere on the globe for more than a hundred years. Barracks and barbed wire remain their most familiar symbols, but a camp is defined more by its detainees than by any physical feature. A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process—sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish.

If prisons are meant for suspects convicted of crimes after a trial, a concentration camp holds those who, most often, had no real trial at all. A detainee is the most specific term for those held in this way, but for the purposes of this book, they can also be considered prisoners or captives. Sometimes, as at Guantánamo, the naming of categories of detainees is bound up with specific legal protections. "Prisoner" might imply the granting of rights due to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, so camp staff tend to refer to them only as detainees.

Concentration camps house civilians rather than combatants—though at many points, from World War I to Guantánamo, camp administrators have not always made an effort to distinguish between the two. Detainees are typically held because of their racial, cultural, religious, or political identity, not because of any prosecutable offense—though some states have remedied this flaw by making legal existence next to impossible. Which is not to say that all detainees are innocent of criminal actions against the government in any given system; rather, the innocent and the guilty alike may be swept up without distinction or recourse.

Concentration camps are established by state policy or, less frequently, run by a provisional government during a conflict or civil war. They represent the exercise of state power against citizens, subjects, or others for whom the government holds some degree of responsibility. Unlike prisons, camps often detain prisoners without a scheduled date of release. Where a date exists, it has generally been set arbitrarily and is changed without warning.

Detention in a handful of camp systems has been framed as protective, ostensibly guarding an unpopular group from public anger—and sometimes they really have offered protection. More commonly, detention is announced as preventative, to keep a suspect group from committing potential future crimes. Only rarely have governments publicly acknowledged the use of camps as deliberate punishment, more often promoting them as part of a civilizing mission to uplift supposedly inferior cultures and races.

If mass civilian detention without trial is the defining feature of a camp, then it becomes possible to look at a whole host of categories of camps, many of which have interrelated histories over time. In internment camps, people are detained for a fixed or indefinite period of time, usually in the wake of a crisis. Transit camps generally deport people to another camp or region. Labor camps require work from detainees, usually on behalf of the state. And detainees in extermination camps are completely cut off from sustenance or murdered outright.

Political philosopher Hannah Arendt described concentration camps as divided into Purgatory, Hades, and Hell, moving from the netherland of internment to labor camps of the Gulag and Nazi death factories. But nearly all concentration camps share one feature: they extract people from one area to house them somewhere else. It sounds like a simple concept, but both elements are distinct and important. Camps require the removal of a population from a society with all its accompanying rights, relationships, and connections to humanity. This exclusion is followed by an involuntary assignment to some lesser condition or place, generally detention with other undesirables under armed guard. Of these afterworlds, Arendt writes, "All three types have one thing in common: the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death."

The concentration camp experience rarely begins and ends inside barbed wire. It is part of a process—usually one that starts with arrest and interrogation, continues via a journey of minutes, days, or weeks to a camp, and persists in exile or continued threat of punishment after release. The worst moments of detention tend to define the entire experience. As Resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry wrote, "Whoever was tortured, stays tortured."¹

A typical concentration camp includes communal living among hundreds or thousands of people, though in some cases, particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century, detainees have also been held in small groups, in an attempt to keep them hidden. There are few hard lines in classification, as concentration camps can bleed into other categories of camps, giving them dual identities. At some sites, convicted prisoners ended up comprising a measurable percentage of the population, and were brought in to supervise and police political detainees. At other times convicts were sent to camps after serving their legal sentences, instead of being released into the general population.

Elsewhere, refugee camps built to deal with massive immigration—often due to war—have sometimes transformed into hybrid refugee-concentration camps. For more than a century, countries have established refugee camps to coordinate food and shelter during crises. But where the camps exist predominantly to isolate refugees and relegate them to dangerous or inhospitable terrain, serve as de facto detention areas to discourage border crossing, or become permanent purgatory for detainees unable to return home, they begin to take on characteristics of concentration camps. With refugee populations, a clear line does not always mark the peripheries of concentration camp definitions.

Differences between the earliest camp systems and the later Nazi concentration camp model have led historians like Andreas Stucki to ask whether such varied settings and results even belong together under the category "concentration camp."² But examination of the entire range of camps reveals that while they developed differences in tactics as well as tremendous variability in outcomes due to limits that culture and governments imposed on them, most systems arose from similar political crises and possessed parallel early goals.

2. Unlike war, murder, and the baroque tortures of antiquity, concentration camps do not stretch back across millennia. Criminal statutes in the ancient world more often called for exile, execution, or physical punishment—such as branding or flogging—than detention. The Mesopotamian Code of Ur-Nammu, a legal code dating back more than four thousand years, designates murder as the sovereign punishment for a range of crimes, from robbery and deflowering married virgins to murder itself. Detention, on the other hand, necessitates feeding and sheltering prisoners, obligations that offer a partial explanation for the late debut of jails and camps alike.

While some later camp phenomena, such as permanent tattoos to identify prisoners, made an appearance in the Roman Empire, authorities there resisted sentencing subjects to incarceration.³ Mass imprisonment as a societal tool arrived in the era of factories and public schools, when having an assigned role in a large hierarchical group with a supervisor to enforce order or efficiency became part of daily life.⁴ Yet forced labor does have deep historical roots. The Romans condemned subjects to hard labor on infrastructure projects, or in mines—damnatio ad metallum—through sentences handed down to those convicted of criminal offenses.⁵ During the same era, Chinese dynasties instigated a system of corvée labor, in which every adult was expected to work for the state one month each year.⁶ Corvée servitude, however, was not imposed as punishment but was part of an individual's obligations to the emperor.

Imperial Russia made similar use of peasant conscription at the beginning of the eighteenth century for the construction of St. Petersburg, where tens of thousands of Russian peasants died driving wooden piles into the swampland upon which the city would be built. Later, tsars established penal labor, in which convicts were sent thousands of miles from home to katorga, working in bitter Siberian settings under a nebulous legal status. Traveling eleven weeks to see prisoners working on Sakhalin Island in 1890, Anton Chekhov detailed the suffering he witnessed in a camp there. He described children falling asleep in piles of prisoners alongside their fettered convict parents and complained that no legal definition of katorga or its purpose existed.⁷ The legacies of corvée labor and katorga would shape the local evolution of concentration camps as they made their way into Russia and China in the twentieth century.⁸

History's most direct precursors of concentration camps, however, appeared in the wake of Columbus's 1492 voyage. The Spanish Empire led the way, authorizing a system of religious missions in New Spain that began a year after Columbus's arrival and continued into the 1800s. The timing of campaigns varied, but from California to Peru, a policy of reducción reigned. Native communities were burned, and millions were forcibly relocated out of the countryside into new villages or into mission compounds. Fortress garrisons enforced the plan, while Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans "civilized" their wards, converting them to Christianity, teaching them to read, and socializing them as Europeans.

In the midst of this process, Spanish authorities conducted the Valladolid Debate of 1550, a formal argument over whether Indians were human beings or "natural slaves."⁹ After the close of the debate, both sides claimed victory, as Spain pressed on with reducción. Concentrated together in the missions, many of which were crude and filthy, natives had little chance for survival in the face of devastating European epidemics such as typhus and smallpox.

The United States' removal of native populations in the eastern half of North America began later than the Spanish efforts but was similarly brutal. A series of conflicts that would come to be known as the Indian Wars raged intermittently from the American Revolution into and across the whole of the nineteenth century. Using bribery and coercion to co-opt some leaders, the US government attempted to extricate whole Native American nations from their own territory in the Southeast during the 1830s. In a series of forced relocations that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears, Cherokees were held in detention at transit camps rife with dysentery before being forced farther west to reservations in present-day Oklahoma.¹⁰

Many tried to escape, only to find themselves captured. The officer in charge of Fort Hetzel, Georgia, reported to army headquarters in May 1838 on his efforts to track fleeing Indians prior to departure: "I commenced on the 26th securing the Indians. I have made prisoners of 425 or perhaps 450. I think by the time I get in the outstanding members of the families that I have broken up I will have as many as I can manage.… They run in every instance where they have the best opportunity."¹¹ Some four thousand Cherokee died en route, and more than ten thousand Native Americans from all the relocated tribes did not survive the march.

Canada, too, pinned its indigenous peoples down on reserves and in some regions forced residents to apply for travel passes to leave their designated territory—despite the fact that the pass system had no legal foundation under the Indian Act or the Criminal Code.¹² Lacking only more effective technology to enable complete detention on such a massive scale, nineteenth-century Native American reservations and earlier Spanish missions prefigured concentration camp systems to come.

3. The spark that ignited imperial willingness to commit to concentration camps at the end of the nineteenth century can be found in the US Civil War, a watershed conflict that forever transformed the treatment of civilians in combat. The brutality of the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where some thirteen thousand US soldiers died, is sometimes considered a harbinger of the civilian concentration camps that soon followed. But the establishment of camps later in the century owes as much or more to the Union Army's theoretical approach to the war, as well as the actual tactics it employed to win.

The Lieber Code of Conduct, written by jurist Francis Lieber in 1863 and adopted by the US Army, tried for the first time to modernize the rules of war. The code explicitly rejected torture and laid out a plan for humane treatment of noncombatants, but loopholes meant to deal with guerrilla fighters and concerns about binding the military's hands too tightly left room for brutal tactics. In a war of rebellion, the code authorized commanders to expel or imprison "disloyal civilians," even those "known to sympathize with the rebellion without positively aiding it."¹³ Commanders were also authorized to administer loyalty oaths, with a wide range of punishments permitted against those who refused. Though every attempt should be made to protect loyal citizens during the rebellion, Lieber wrote, the burden of war should be made to fall disproportionately on civilians deemed disloyal.¹⁴ All these elements would become key in the creation of concentration camps.

The Lieber Code's effects were limited during the Civil War itself but provided a foundation for US military conduct going forward. Lieber's ideas introduced a clever approach to forbidding specific war crimes, such as torture and poison, while legitimizing almost everything else. Shortly after the war, Germany adopted the code almost wholesale. Its balance of limited humanitarian assurances and broad authorization of military powers during wartime inspired similar regulations in more than half a dozen other countries.¹⁵ The code also served in subsequent decades as the basis for the development of international laws of war, first at The Hague in 1899 and then at the Second Geneva Convention in 1906. Embracing the common ground they had suddenly discovered, nations worldwide failed for decades to adequately address the fate of civilian noncombatants or to foresee the extensive role that civilian detention camps would come to play in war.

The Civil War legitimized camps in other ways. Orders from Major General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 advised his cavalry on its way through Virginia to hold all male civilians under the age of fifty "as prisoners of war not as citizen prisoners," setting in place a dichotomy that directly subordinated civilians to battle strategy.¹⁶ Sherman further institutionalized total war, in which everything under the sun, including civilians and their possessions, could be used as means to the military's desired end, with personal possessions destroyed alongside strategic assets.

During the last year of the war, General Philip Sheridan laid waste to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, and General Sherman went on his March to the Sea through Georgia and South Carolina. In both cases, troops burned and sacked not just military matériel, but also the homes, businesses, and crops of civilian residents. One officer from Ohio on Sherman's March observed, "The country behind us is left a howling wilderness, an utter desolation."¹⁷

The willingness to destroy everything was a revelation; the two generals' tactics would amaze and inspire generations of generals around the world. Five years after the end of the Civil War, Sheridan encouraged Prussian forces to adopt harsher methods in dealing with enemy civilians. As a guest of Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, he advocated a strategy of "causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their Government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war."¹⁸

While many have argued the necessity of embracing cruel strategies in pursuit of one of history's most noble causes—an end to slavery in America—the widespread adoption of Sherman and Sheridan's methods meant that the same tactics would soon be embraced around the world for a whole range of lesser objectives. Demanding devastating victory without concession or negotiation became the goal, and strategic punishment of civilian populations to break the back of enemy forces occurred again and again.

Historian Jonathan Hyslop has analyzed how an increasing professionalization of the officer corps in militaries around the world during the nineteenth century seems to have had the paradoxical effect of heightened brutality against civilians, fostering the rise of concentration camps. He also references the concept of Ausnahmezustand ("state of exception") described by General Julius von Hartmann in the 1870s to explain how a state of war served to remove all legal restraints in place during peacetime.¹⁹ I would go further and argue that this normalization of extreme measures made punishing civilians appear not only permissible but necessary for any campaign truly committed to victory.

4. The final elements making concentration camps possible came from innovations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Public health, census taking, and bureaucratic efficiencies all played their part, as did inventions such as barbed wire and automatic weapons.

In the public health arena, governments began to take a role in maintaining public sanitation and disease-free communities, and of "numbering the people" in order to track them toward that end. The germ theory of disease revealed the nature of contagion and how illnesses spread—a triumph of rational discovery. But the same Enlightenment rationality and efficiency could be mixed in a stew with irrational fears and ignorance to assault those seen as inferior. For decades, American sociologists studied an extended family they named the "Jukes," at first showing the role that environment and poverty played in fostering criminal behavior but eventually claiming that the research vindicated theories of inherited feeblemindedness and degeneracy. Public health measures further introduced the idea that the state had a sometimes punitive role to play in protecting citizens through monitoring the spread of disease and enforcing health codes.

Industrial innovations included barbed wire, patented and put into mass production in the 1870s, which immediately found use in military campaigns. Ditches, trenches, and fortified buildings surrounded by barbed-wire mazes changed battlefield tactics, slowing cavalry charges and delaying the progress of soldiers on foot. The new invention was, however, not just effective at keeping the enemy out; it could also be used to keep prisoners in.

In 1898, Hilaire Belloc composed a couplet about the might of the British Empire in Africa as part of a children's treasury, writing "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not." With barbed wire to trap people in camps, automatic weapons would soon make it possible to assert precise and devastating control over them. In time, barbed wire and automatic weapons together would make it simple for a small guard force to hold a tremendous number of detainees indefinitely. War strategies had already made civilian detention permissible; suddenly it also became feasible. By this point, the brutalization of civilians had not only been practiced on indigenous groups around the globe but employed against white American southerners and Europeans as well.

In hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that concentration camps would emerge. Yet hindsight also brings with it a moral clarity generally lacking in the moment. Concentration camps perpetually offer the illusion of a simple solution available to the malicious and myopic alike. If it were easy to understand in real time the threat represented by the camps, at least the myopic might be less inclined to keep resurrecting them.

Concentration camps are at heart a modern phenomenon and belong in the company of the atomic bomb as one of the few advanced innovations in violence. Just as other kinds of bombs existed before nuclear devices were developed, concentration camps also had precursors, but nonetheless represented a deliberate escalation and transformation of previous tactics. In both cases, observers realized that some dangerous genie was being released from a bottle, but in neither instance would it have been possible to imagine everything that would follow.

5. Literary scholar Leona Toker writes that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's achievement in writing about the Soviet Gulag is that "he has provided a broad basis for polemic that comes closest to a substitute for the Nuremberg Trials."²⁰ Where no trial is expected, an author can make a case of his or her own. I have tried to acknowledge those cases in which camps have intentionally or inadvertently played some kind of protective role for detainees, at least for a while, such as some internment camps from the First World War, which preserved mostly military-age males from conscription and the higher risk of death in combat. Even in those cases, however, the evidence in this book adds up to a brief for the prosecution against the very idea of concentration camps.