They Hate Our Sanity, Too

One of the Bush administration's guests at the Guantánamo Bay anomaly is showing signs of the charmingly-named condition "secure housing unit psychosis", according to lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. The gentleman in question, Bisher al-Rawi, is a British-resident Iraqi who, in an act of blatant and vicious anti-Westernism, left the country as a child, when it was still being ruled by Saddam Hussein. With ruthless animal cunning, he retained Iraqi citizenship "in the hope that one day he would be able to claim the family's abandoned property" - a likely story. He, his brothers and two other men were arrested during a trip to Gambia for the transparently ostensible purpose of setting up a "peanut processing business". As in so many other cases at Guantánamo, this was such a cunning disguise for the men's true purpose that al-Rawi has never been charged with any offence. Nevertheless, Stafford Smith describes the conditions of his imprisonment as "worse than any death row I've ever seen", which must surely comfort all who believe that terrorist suspects deserve a fate worse than death. Stafford Smith's American colleague Brent Mickum claims that al-Rawi's "treatment is designed to achieve a single objective: to make him lose his mind"; so presumably there is still hope that his condition is a genuine aim of the Guantánamo secure housing unit administration, rather than yet another act of asymmetrical warfare against his helpless jailers.