News-Record.com

So Charlotte Observer reporter Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin just happened to be down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this past weekend, doing a feature on the prison's commander (who's from Kings Mountain, 45 minutes or so west of Charlotte), when three inmates hanged themselves.

Gordon, surprise, acted like a reporter: He filed a story. (And at least two others on succeeding days.)

As a reward, he and Sumlin were kicked off the base, and reporters from the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald who had arrived to cover the suicides also were ordered to leave.

Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon (whose relationship, if any, to Michael Gordon is not characterized), speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this incident. He told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, "We are not into content management. The issue was that other media were threatening to take us to court." But the same spokesman also said Gordon's reporting had caused "controversy" and added, "He was doing a hometowner [i.e., an article on someone famous by a newspaper in that person's home town], a hometowner takes one day. You would think that a man allowed down for a whole week would be a bit more gracious about it. Have the good grace and class to leave."

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that a decent hometowner necessarily can be done in a day, how dare reporter Gordon do his, you know, job and all?

It would seem that Bumgarner, the prison commander, also suffers from a failure to understand the source of the problem:

But inside the detention facility, military leaders started clamping down on discipline and security in what they say is an effort to stop another round of suicide attempts already being planned.

"Right now, we are at ground zero," an emotional prison commander, Col. Mike Bumgarner told his officers at his [Monday] morning staff meeting.

"The trust level is gone. They [prisoners] have shown time and time again that we can't trust them any farther than we can throw them. There is not a trustworthy son of a ... in the entire bunch."

With that, Bumgarner, a Kings Mountain native, ordered his staff to assess and curtail existing policies on detainee clothing, meals, recreation time, prison lighting and discipline. He ordered more frequent patrols in the cellblocks. He said existing rules on detainee behavior must be enforced quickly and fully.

"If a brother [a term used both by U.S. troops to refer to Muslim prisoners and by male Muslims generally to refer to themselves] covers up a window with a sheet or blanket, you give him an order and then you go get him ...," Bumgarner said.

Later in the day, the colonel said the tougher restrictions would stay in place for the foreseeable future.

"Once I get a better read of things, I can manage a better balance of their quality of life with the security of this facility."

I'm all for more frequent patrols to prevent suicide. But the rest of it? Let's see: Suicide = betrayal of the commandant's trust. Degrading the quality of life of hundreds of prisoners -- in a facility where quality of life is already so bad that five United Nations experts have called for its closure -- is justified because of the suicides of three and the alleged planning of suicide of several more. Quality of inmate life and facility security constitute a zero-sum game.

And war is peace and ignorance is strength.

And it ain't just Bumgarner and Gordon:

"These men are smart, creative and committed, and they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own," Guantanamo Bay commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris said Saturday during a news conference in Miami.

"We have men who are committed to al-Qaida and the Taliban. They were captured on the battlefield. They are continuing their fight against us here."

Yeah. And suicide is just a good PR move.

In fact, none of the three had been charged with a crime, although they'd been held for more than two years with little access to lawyers or courts. And at least one was going to be released soon, although he hadn't been informed of that fact.

Since Pentagon spokesman Gordon feels up to telling us how to do our jobs, I'm going to tell tell him how to do his: Stop treating prisoners so badly they come to see suicide as preferable. Stop violating international law. And stop whining about the media when your problems are a direct result of your organization's behavior.

(Full disclosure: I've got family and friends who work at the Observer, but I don't know either reporter Gordon or photographer Sumlin.)