The Guantanamo Dilemma: Bush Mess Continues to Damage US
The problems facing the Obama administration in closing Guantanamo Bay appear mainly to center on finding a place for the prisoners to go. Very few of them are ever going to be tried. There is a handful of the truly murderous among them-- the big al-Qaeda leaders caught mainly by Pakistan security forces, and those none of us would like to see free. While Andy Worthington has shown that very large numbers of the prisoners had never been terrorists in any rational use of the term-- and many had been sold to the US by the Taliban and were innocent-- the problem is that the ones remaining are more likely actually to have been militants in some cause. What could the the US have done with Uighurs who fled Urumqi to Afghanistan and got picked up there because they were hanging around with Taliban? The Uighurs have nothing against the US and are not a danger to it. If they had been sent to China they might have been executed or (further) tortured. The solution, of getting small islands to take them, wasn't very satisfactory. It caused a diplomatic incident with the UK, and the Uighurs have been permanently severed from their friends and family. This is a kind of "social death," which is a key feature also of slavery.
The problem ultimately derives from Bush-Cheney's attempt to create a realm of extra-judiciality, a place where no law operates, no habeas corpus is granted, where the individuals concerned are at the complete mercy of the king (oops, I mean president). Many Bush-Cheney policies resembled the Bill of Attainder and other 18th-century royal abuses, for the end of which the US Founding Fathers labored.
I wrote as far back as 2005:
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Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware has now called for Guantanamo to be closed down. Absolutely right.
The main reason is not that it is a continued scandal and creates a very poor image among Muslims worldwide of the United States. This allegation is true, and the US press has done a poor job of covering the continued fall-out of the Quran desecration story among Muslims world-wide. But it isn't the main reason the prison should be closed.
The main reason is that the Bush Administration established the prison at Guantanamo in hopes of gutting the Bill of Rights. They wanted the prisoners there to be beyond the law, outside the framework of judiciality. They would have no lawyers. They would be tried only if the administration wanted to try them. They would be held indefinitely. They would be outside the framework of US law and also of the Geneval Conventions-- though Rumsfeld keeps slipping and calling them prisoners of war.
Terrorists are dirty criminals who should be tried, and if found guilty, put away for life. Terrorists are criminals. They are not non-human, and any attempt to create a category of human beings to whom the protections of the law do not apply is an attempt to undermine the Republic. It is a return of the Bill of Attainder, a feature of absolute monarchy that the Founding Fathers stood against. It is something to which even Rehnquist is opposed.
Once it was established that these Muslims could be treated in this way, Bush would be a sort of absolute monarch over all such detainees (remember that some of them might be innocent for all we know) And then gradually others could be added to the category of the "rights-less." The Patriot Act II envisages stripping Americans of their citizenship for supporting terrorist organizations. Without citizenship, they would not be afforded the protections of the Constitution. And gradually, in this way, the American nationalist Right would be able to circumscribe that pesky Bill of Rights, which so interferes with Executive (i.e. Royal) Privilege. The legal minds on the American Right have clearly been annoyed with the Bill of Rights for some time and the speed with which they foisted the so-called PATRIOT Act (makes it kinda hard to oppose, calling it that, huh?) on an unwary Congress, which had no time to read it, suggests that they had a lot of these ideas on the shelf ready to go.
Guantanamo Prison should be closed because it was conceived as the beginning of the end of the American Republic.'
Some of the difficulties now facing Obama in closing the place remind me of the problems abolitionists in the 19th century had in giving manumitted slaves a new place in life. Lindsey Graham's desire to lock up the prisoners forever without a trial makes me wonder if there just has to be somebody somewhere enslaved to make certain regional elites in the US happy.
Aljazeera English reports on the difficulties facing President Obama in closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay:
in this regard:
Aljazeera Arabic actually had a reporter arrested for trying to report from the Afghan front, and he is planning to sue George W. Bush for wrongful imprisonment.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 7/21/2009 10:04:00 AM
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10 Comments:
Since many of these Gitmo detainees were illegally seized to begin with, why not just reverse the policy?
The CIA can airlift them into various nations, drop them off somewhere with a fake passport and a few thousand dollars to get started on a new life.
Problem solved.
Not to mention that for some of them. if they were not angry terrorists before they went to Guantanamo, they are now.
What's the point of closing Guantanamo if we're not going to release the largely innocent detainees? The administration is correct in saying that most of the detainees cannot be tried in a court of law. But it seems that Obama is intent on merely transferring the detainees to another prison, which solves nothing. We may as well leave Guantanamo up if we're going to waste money on transfering the detainees to another camp. I think closing Guantanamo has everything to do with a symbolic gesture and not liberty for the detainees.
"The problems facing the Obama administration in closing Guantanamo Bay appear mainly to center on finding a place for the prisoners to go."
With a current prisoner population of about a 2.3 million we certainly have the incarceration expertise and the facilities to handle the meager Guantanamo bunch. What we don't have is a political climate that lends itself to solving problems.
What we do have is a political climate that institutionalizes problems. Bush created Guantanamo with complete ease. He created all of his anti terror programs like water rolling off a ducks back. But once created, Obama's and others' view seems to be there is no going back.
I guess you could say that Bush turned out the lights, and then removed the switch.
It may have started under Cheney/Bush, but now Obama owns this mess and as Glenn Greenwald points out in his latest post (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/21/detention/index.html), the solutions this administration are considering are equally (if not more) disturbing.
Preventive (or preemptive) incarceration without a chance of trial is anathema to the American (and International) system of law and should NEVER be considered.
What confuses me, Mr Cole, is that you are an intelligent man. Surely you know that Bagram is the same type of prison as Guantanamo. The are no plans to close it. And even if Guantanamo is closed, it will not change the legal status of the prisoners. So why are you cheerleading for Obama's PR stunt of closing Guantanamo?
Also, if you buy into the Bush-line that Guantanamo really houses some of the "worst of the worst terrorists", first off, where did you get your evidence of their guilt from? and secondly, why not try them in a normal civilian court like Timothy McVeigh?
This is simple: George W. Bush and Corporation Global War on Terror must cough up the money to build (on the property owned by Mr. Bush, et al., donated to the cause - DONATED), must provide any/all funds necessary to "house" these poor broken body/ies, mind/s, and soul/s | spirit/s.
Clearly, he profited from this crime and therefore, he must be brought into RICO, to pay for his acts and the actions he demanded of criminal insanity for the profit-sharing of the human flesh trade.
Here, in the 21st Century, it is all about the money, therefore, it should get down to this real fast and then, and only then, can we see A RECKONING, which makes the accounting look like just the pre-primer.
OFF TOPIC (Afghanistan) Chris Hedges, War WIthout Purpose : “Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners — build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals... We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war... No one seems to be able to articulate why we are in Afghanistan : Is it to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaida? Is it to consolidate progress? Have we declared war on the Taliban? Are we building democracy? Are we fighting terrorists there so we do not have to fight them here? Are we “liberating” the women of Afghanistan? The absurdity of the questions, used as thought-terminating clichés, exposes the absurdity of the war. The confusion of purpose mirrors the confusion on the ground.”
ref : “July is Deadliest Month Since US Invasion of Afghanistan”
“The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France’s Lyon and London’s Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate : It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.”
This in my humble opinion in an exceptional article. I have heard of letters of marque and bills of attainment but until now have not known how tyrannical these attainment bills were (are). I would like to add that bills of attainment seem to me to be direct attacks not only on the right of privacy from the individual's (victim's) point of view but maybe more importantly a direct attack on the concept of privacy from the point of view of the community from which that individual is "attained".
ref : “Bush Legacy” David Bromwitch, Professor of Literature at Yale; The Wars Beyond the Horizon : “We have begun to talk casually about our wars; and this should be surprising for several reasons. To begin with, in the history of the United States war has never been considered the normal state of things. For two centuries, Americans were taught to think ‘war’ itself an aberration, and "wars" in the plural could only have seemed doubly aberrant. Younger generations of Americans, however, are now being taught to expect no end of war — and no end of wars. ”
“Couple the casualty-free air war that NATO conducted over Yugoslavia with the Powell doctrine of multiple wars and safe exits, and you arrive somewhere close to the terrain of the Af-Pak war of the present moment. A war in one country may now cross the border into a second with hardly a pause for public discussion or a missed step in appropriations. When wars were regarded as, at best, a necessary evil, one asked about a given war whether it was strictly necessary. Now that wars are a way of life, one asks rather how strong a foothold a war plants in its region as we prepare for the war to follow.”
“A new-modeled usage has been brought into English to ease the change of view. In the language of think-tank papers and journalistic profiles over the past two years, one finds a strange conceit beginning to be presented as matter-of-fact: namely the plausibility of the U.S. mapping with forethought a string of wars. Robert Gates put the latest thinking into conventional form, once again, on 60 Minutes in May. Speaking of the Pentagon's need to focus on the war in Afghanistan, Gates said: "I wanted a department that frankly could walk and chew gum at the same time, that could wage war as we are doing now, at the same time we plan and prepare for tomorrow's wars."”
“The weird prospect that this usage -- "tomorrow's wars" -- renders routine is that we anticipate a good many wars in the near future. We are the ascendant democracy, the exceptional nation in the world of nations. To fight wars is our destiny and our duty. Thus the word "wars" -- increasingly in the plural -- is becoming the common way we identify not just the wars we are fighting now, but all the wars we expect to fight.”
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