Fact, Fiction and A Guantanamo Shrouded In the Myths

How did "Devil's Island" become the symbol of French prison brutality? When did "Hanoi Hilton" become synonymous with Vietnamese prison camps? Did the Soviet Union ever exist without having "The Gulag Archipelago"?

Now there is a new film, a novel and a nonfiction account of the latest candidate to join the symbolic fraternity of state-sanctioned torture: Guantanamo.

Yes, the little prison by the bay.

In a 14-day span, it stars in "The Road to Guantanamo," the docudrama from British director Michael Winterbottom; "The Prisoner of Guantanamo," a thriller from novelist Dan Fesperman; and "Guantanamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power," a nonfiction account of the Supreme Court legal challenges to detentions at the camp, by plaintiff's attorney Joseph Margulies.

Together, the cinematic and literary trifecta (with an assist from the Supreme Court ruling yesterday) attempts to lift the idea of Guantanamo Bay from a geographic description further into the realm of myth and symbolism -- a place so prominent in the popular imagination that it begins to leave fact and history and journalism behind.

Why does it seem so appropriate that the only prominent film characterization of the U.S. military base at Guantanamo pre-Sept. 11, 2001, "A Few Good Men," features Jack Nicholson as an arrogant Marine colonel who shouts the immortal line, "You can't handle the truth!" at fuzzy-cheeked attorney Tom Cruise for questioning his violent tactics?

What is the truth about Gitmo, and, creatively speaking, does it even matter anymore?

"I was interested in the land between the myths of Guantanamo," says Fesperman, a former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, whose three previous novels of international intrigue have garnered strong reviews.

"For the military, the idea is that this is the necessary dumping station for the worst of the worst terrorists, which not even all of them believe anymore. The idea in the larger world is that this is one of the greatest marks of shame in American history. . . . It's going to be spoken of in the same way that Devil's Island is in France."

Winterbottom, the docudrama specialist ("Welcome to Sarajevo"), creates a frightening world in "Road." It's the based-on-fact tale of three British citizens of Pakistani descent who are mistakenly swept up in an arrest in Afghanistan and packed off to Gitmo. They were mind-numbingly naive to have wandered into Afghanistan days after the Sept. 11 attacks, if not criminally stupid, but the idea that they were jihadists could have been dismissed had anyone checked.

It's their experience -- the innocents abroad, swept up by American arrogance and ignorance -- that helps create the symbolic Gitmo: America, Land of Lies and Cruelty.

"The Bush administration created the entire myth of Guantanamo by saying these [inmates] were almost super-human, or sub-human, in their ability to destroy the world," Winterbottom said over a beer last week. "It justified things for them. It was useful to say. . . . But the fact has turned out to be that these are simply not the worst people in the world. Most of them should have never been there at all."

Guantanamo as an actual place, in the words of Fesperman, who has reported from the camp, "is spectacular material." A century-old relic of a leased American naval base, Guantanamo became a delicate issue during the Cold War. Now it's a hot, humid section of Castro's Cuba, where Muslims in orange jumpsuits commit suicide inside a razor-wired terrorist penal colony. Only buzzards and iguanas move about without clearance, and you get the idea one of the big lizards gets two to the back of the brain every now and again on general principle.

As a symbolic setting for the place where America lost its ideals while trying to protect them, such a place is completely over the top. Salman Rushdie would dismiss it out of hand. Norman Mailer would laugh it off the page. Ian McEwan wouldn't have dreamed of it. Kafka, he could have worked with it in the tale "In the Penal Colony."

Which brings us to the importance of story, even at the expense of hard fact.

None of these storytellers, nor most reporters who have covered the detentions at the base, believe the Pentagon's original description of the inmates at Guantanamo as "the worst of the worst." Maybe, these tales collectively assert, there are a few dozen bad guys actually housed at Gitmo. Most are dismissed as "dirt farmers" mistakenly caught up in mass arrests.

That display of U.S. incompetence, coupled with the administration's attempt to shut off the inmates from any legal process, has created the idea of a place where terrible things happen to Muslims every day. And once a place passes the tipping point of infamy, almost anything about it will be believed. There is such a thing, after all, as poetic truth, which can be believed without being factual.

In the messy international world of fact, fiction, political history and memoir, these issues have combined in unpredictable ways.

There is no doubt, for example, that Devil's Island was an appalling place. It was part of the notorious penal colony off the coast of French Guiana -- but it did not become an international icon until a tattooed French thug named Henri Charriere managed to escape and put pen to paper.

"Papillon" (Charriere's prison nom de guerre, for the butterfly tattooed on his chest) became an international literary sensation and a mesmerizing film starring Steve McQueen in 1973. Audiences identified with the inmate who was determined to survive, because the cruelty of the prison overshadowed his previous criminal history. Similarly, the crowd on the street that chanted "Attica! Attica! Attica!" in "Dog Day Afternoon" was sympathetic to a cornered bank robber holding hostages, not to the police trying to free them. The rallying cry was not specific to the notorious 1971 riot at the New York prison, but "Attica" had become synonymous with police thuggery. The sympathy was with the outlaw with the gun, not those who would impose law and order.

Today, much of the mania over Gitmo in factual human rights reporting is overblown -- and this is from Margulies, the author and plaintiff's attorney. He dismisses the comparison of Guantanamo to the gulag by a prominent human rights group as "irresponsible." Perhaps 450 men remain at Guantanamo's prison camps, which have existed for just over four years. Even if the treatment of inmates in "Road" is accurate -- short shackling, hoods and goggles, blaring music, isolation -- it simply doesn't compare in magnitude or severity to the prison camps of lasting notoriety.

That said, "knowing that we aren't up there with the worst that history has managed to create doesn't bring a lot of comfort," he says. "The whole intent was to get these people to a place where the law didn't apply. . . . In the history of American armed conflict, we had never created a prison system like the black sites in Eastern Europe, like Guantanamo."

Perhaps it falls to Donald Rumsfeld to give the parting assessment of the penal camps at Guantanamo. It was, he once said, "the least worst place" the military could find.

History, real or imagined, just loves a good epitaph.