Personal information on detainees was withheld solely to protect detainee privacy and for their own security…. [Disclosure] could result in retribution or harm to the detainees or their families.

—Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, U.S. military spokesman in Guantánamo Bay, on why the Pentagon refused for four years to release the names of the prisoners held at the offshore prison, until a federal judge ordered it to do so this week.

Ever since it started shipping prisoners arrested in Afghanistan and Pakistan to prison facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Bush administration has fought ferociously to keep them away from the rule of law and the skeptical eye of the international community. First, the suspects were planted upon a plot of occupied land that the U.S. government contends it leased but the Cuban government claims was taken by force. (When’s the last time you “leased” a car from your Honda dealer at gunpoint?) Then, it refused to allow the prisoners to see lawyers or family, classified them as “enemy combatants” to advance a flimsy legal argument for holding them indefinitely without charges, and prevented any outside group (except, after a while, the International Committee of the Red Cross) from gaining access to the prisoners. Even after incidents of torture came to light, the administration continued to refuse to release the identities of the prison’s occupants — until The Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and a federal judge ruled against the government, demanding that the relevant documents be handed over on Friday.

Following their usual practice of letting no bad deed go un-spun, the Bush administration is suddenly making itself out to be a kinder, gentler jailer. The identities of Guantánamo’s prisoners, says a Pentagon spokesman, were withheld “solely to protect detainee privacy and for their own security.”

Privacy? Security? Sir, have you no sense of irony?

It is truly awe-inspiring to watch a government spokesperson say these things with a straight face. It reminds me of how the Pentagon, when faced with a rash of attempted suicides at the Guantánamo prison, started reclassifying them as “manipulative self-injurious behaviors” — because anyone who wants to kill himself is just being “manipulative.”

Of course, it is possible that the Guantánamo prisoners, wasting away for years in their cells with no connection to the world outside, are really pining for privacy. They don’t want anyone else to know or care about what happens to them. Their detainment is, after all, a private matter to be discussed between the prisoner and his jailer. Perhaps they’re afraid of identity theft or telemarketers.

It is possible that the prisoners fear for their safety, too. Inside the Guantánamo prison, they’ve been pampered — with repeated beatings and sexual abuse, having feeding tubes shoved up their noses without sedatives, being chained in a fetal position for hours until they defecate upon themselves. Outside, who knows what may happen to them?

There are surely some very bad men holed up in Guantánamo. But after five years of this human rights (and public relations) disaster, there is still no compelling reason why the prisoners being held there can’t be charged with crimes, given fair trails, and then, if found guilty, sentenced and punished. Does the Bush administration persist in its Orwellian policies because of mere stubbornness or because it lacks any evidence that many of these men were actually al-Qaeda fighters (as a review of the Pentagon’s own data concluded)?

Or maybe the government has just grown attached to its little gulag in sunny Guantánamo. What would the 500-some prisoners do without the Bush administration to look after their privacy, security, and tendencies toward “manipulative self-injurious behavior”?

Maybe this is what George Bush meant when he talked about compassionate conservatism. At Guantánamo, Big Brother knows best.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world knows nothing.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen