Indefinite detentions are worse than death, for at least in death there is some type of finality and a sense of closure. For many of the "Indefinite" Detainees at Guantanamo Prison Camp, then, their experience is a living death, a living hell. It is even worse than being confined in small and crowded mesh kennels, or having to endure months of total and extreme isolation. During these periods of total isolation, the human detainee is deprived of sleep and continually tormented with intense light and severe temperatures. This usually causes psychological trauma such as talking to non-existent people, hearing voices, and crouching in a corner of the cell covered in a sheet for hours on end.(1)

Still, indefinite detentions are worse than being chained hand and foot in a fetal position on a cold hard floor for days without food and water, and having to lay in one's own vomit, urination and defecation. It is just as inhumane as shackling detainees in stress positions and forced standings, religious and sexual humiliations, exploiting the human detainees phobias to induce stress, or scenarios designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family.(2) Like mock executions and water-boarding, indefinite detentions are a kind of psychological and spiritual torture designed to "break" and destroy a human being.

As another hunger strike spreads at Guantanamo Prison Camp, more than 100 of the 166 human detainees, one is reminded of what Tominaga Shozo, a young newly trained officer in the Japanese army, wrote in 1941. After a brutal military invasion and occupation against the people of Nanking, China, he recalls the first time he met those who would be under his command. "When I looked at the men of my platoon," wrote Shozo, "I was stunned-they had evil eyes. They weren't human eyes but the eyes of leopards or tigers." He then writes how he was taken to a room, all Chinese, and how his commander announced: "These are the raw materials for your trial of courage."(3)

While Shozo remembers being astonished at how thin and emaciated these Chinese people looked, his commander declared, "They haven't been fed for several days, so they'll be ready for their part in tomorrow's plan." The plan, the test to see if he and other officers were qualified to be platoon leaders, was to sever off a head. If they were unable to chop off a head, they would not be qualified. On the final day, and with twenty-four prisoners squatting with their hands tied behind their backs, each one wearing a blindfold, Shozo's commander reported, "We shall now begin," and demonstrated how heads should be cut off.

After a prisoner was dragged to the edge of a pit, forcing him to kneel on his knees while being beaten and kicked whenever he resisted, Shozo's commander unsheathed his army sword. Scooping water from a bucket with a dipper and pouring it over both sides of the blade, the commander raised his sword in a long arch. Standing behind the prisoners, the commander steadied himself, legs spread apart, and cut off the man's head with a shout, "Yo!" Shozo recalls how the head flew more than a meter away and how blood spurted up in two foundations from the body and sprayed the hole. After witnessing this demonstration, Shozo was required to do the same to another prisoner.

"At that moment," writes Lieutenant Shozo, "I felt something change inside me." He continues, "I don't know how to put it, but I gained strength somewhere in my gut...as we returned to our companies I had been overwhelmed by the sharp eyes of my men when I called the roll each night. That night I realized I was not self-conscious at all in front of them. I didn't even find their eyes evil any more."

For several months, Guantanamo detainees have been on a hunger strike. Physically strapped to chairs and with tubes brutally forced down their noses and throats, in order to send liquid nutrients into their stomachs, they are protesting their inhumane and tortuous environments, along with a number of violent raids by military personnel. Recently, rubber bullets were fired to disperse detainees from associating and for the purpose of confiscating personal items, such as Korans. Since only 8 percent of detainees were ever alleged to have had contact with Al Qaeda, some are demanding, even if it means death, some kind of trial and closure, some sense of human dignity with justice and closure.

Newly trained military personnel and intelligence officers who first visit Guantanamo Prison Camp express how bitter, how filled with hate, and how sharp and evil some of the inmates' eyes appear when they first arrive. But like millions of American veterans, whether politicians, militarists and civilians, or those responsible for the hell-hole, the pit, at Guantanamo, they are merely looking in a mirror. They are projecting their own sharp, evil, bitter, and chaotic sense of justice onto, and into, the indefinitely held eyes of the detainees. With legal swords dipped in immoral renditions and unjust laws, which have decapitated the Geneva Conventions, human dignity and justice has been severed.

As Lieutenant Shozo realized, rituals are difficult to break. Collectively, they are nearly impossible to civilly and humanely disobey. Some of the innocent detainees still imprisoned at Guantanamo are simply the raw materials and courage for the future of the United States' legal system. It is a legal and cultural system that will emaciate human character and any sense of courage while severing a being's moral conscience and spirituality. It is a test of willful and unquestioning obedience, of forced political and global ignorance that, and sad to say, most have already succumbed to. While self-conscious is sheathed, legal black holes are unsheathed, as are many outrageous wars.

Dallas Darling (darling@wn.com)

(Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas' writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.)

(1) Mayer, Jane. The Dark Side. New York, New York: Doubleday Publishers, 2008., p. 203.

(2) Ibid., p. 200.

(3) Tominaga, Shozo. "Qualifying as a Leader," in Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History. New York, New York: New Press, 1992., p. 40-41.