Pitzer - One long night: a global history of concentration camps

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp,
that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

ELIE WIESEL, NIGHT

It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

PRIMO LEVI

1. A DOUBLE-DECKER FERRY CARRIES visitors to the windward side of Guantnamo 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 Fishermans Point, but the lots 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 waters edge commemorates an even earlier invasion. On Christopher Columbuss second voyage to the West in 1494, he visited Fishermans 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 Columbuss expedition, Cuba remained a Spanish colony. But in the 1890s, Spain created the worlds 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 Guantnamo. My interest lay in writing a history of concentration camps. Twenty-firstcentury detention at Guantnamo 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 Guantnamo kept creeping back into view.

I couldnt 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 Guantnamo 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 methe legitimacy of holding untried suspects for more than a decadewas 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.