Gitmo Lawyer Shows His Ass

David Remes, a lawyer representing 15 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo dropped his trousers and lifted his shirt in a press conference in Yemen to demonstrate how guards daily humiliated his clients. No Remes didn’t drop his tidy whities he showed his ass with his remarks.

“I’d been to Guantanamo in mid-June,  and there’s a certain amount of normalcy that has settled over the normal miserable conditions of confinement, which amount to solitary confinement without sleep and without sunlight and without anyone to talk to. So at the news conference, I said that, in addition to this torment, which has become so typical that we don’t even talk about it anymore, now the torment also consists of constant body searches in which the men are required to pull their shirts up to their chest, drop their pants, and then the corn-fed U.S. military sticks their thumbs under the prisoner’s underwear band and circles the prisoner’s torsos. At the press conference in Yemen — this is a society where the rule of morality is so strict — I wanted to drive home the degree of humiliation that these searches cause by illustrating a typical body search. The physical abuse they can stand. The verbal abuse they can stand. But when the military punishes Muslim men by shaving off their beard, or by forcing them to disrobe — for a Muslim man that is a thousand times more cutting than a Westerner can imagine. And that’s what I was trying to dramatize. The reaction to what I did makes me very sad. I wish people paid as much attention to the suffering and torment in Guantanamo as they paid to the way I sought to dramatize it.”

High security prisoners are always searched in any decent prison when being moved from one location to another. The reasons are quite simple. It is done for the guards’ (and other prisoners’) safety. With a little concrete or a rock a toothbrush or an eating utensil quickly becomes a shiv (a home-made knife), a little soap mixed with dirt and/or rocks, softened by water and allowed to harden becomes a lethal blackjack, those tiny blades in a razor become a dangerous weapon when removed from the plastic and pressed into a bar of soap, a piece of wood or a piece of plastic. Prisoners are quite creative when it comes to manufacturing weapons.

Beards are shaved for the same reason. While performing law enforcement duties I can’t tell you the number of times I have found, razor blades, knives, drugs, money and just about everything else hidden in beards, hair, under wigs, in mouths, etc. The guards at Gitmo are soldiers, they too wish to return home safely at the end of their tours but it seems Mr. Remes has no idea of what being a guard is like; instead he is jetting half way around the world, (probably on the taxpayer’s dime) and fanning the flames of radical Islamists with his stupidity. It is bad enough that the Gitmo guards are subjected to spitting, being cursed at, and having feces and urine thrown at them, but now an officer of the court denigrates them for doing their job in a professional manner.

I suggest Mr. Remes get his hands in the food and insect ridden beards of a few prisoners or have to pat down several male unbathed crotches a day. The procedures in place are not punishment; they are for safety and health of both the prisoners and the guards.

When you read the hyperlinked story at the law blog of the Wall Street Journal please read the comments; not all lawyers are scum.