Voices from Guantanamo

Apropos my last post, my father showed me this incredibly powerful video. It is just a series of interviews with British Guantanamo detainees who have been released. The video is called "Voices from Guantanamo", and it does give us some of the voices that have been completely silenced by their captives, voices that have been completely absented from our debates. These people happen to know our cultural mores and way of talking. But most of the prisoners are not so lucky.

The American philosopher Richard Rorty points out that moral progress (so to speak) and activism grow out of stories that force us to include other narratives and ways of speaking in our understanding of ourselves and our communities. According to him, stories are in fact the only way "moral progress" happens.¹ The political activism that follows stems from the moral convictions acquired through stories. These kinds of videos become an important tool in remembering exactly what imprisonment without trial, without limits actually means. Why we have a justice system and why legal checks and balances are important.



1. If you know the work of Richard Rorty, you'll know why I put the phrase in quotes. If not, well: long story.

Non Habeas Corpus

Sure, we have these people locked up already, so who cares about building a case against them. Or, y'know, keeping records about them:

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Which, I suppose, leads one to wonder exactly how they knew these people were evil terrorist illegal enemy islamofascist non-human pond scum. If there weren't any records being kept, or for that matter being collected. How did they do reviews and inventories to make sure that all the cases were properly overseen? That their judgment in each case was correct? How did they even know who they were dealing with?

But lest we forget, these were "very bad people". Terrorists and bombers and "responsible for 9-11". Man, they really locked up some perverters of democracy. Good going, guys.

Which reminds me of something William Gibson said, back at the end of the halcyon days of the first Bush administration.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

*

Oh, completely unrelated - a really weird Google ad in this article:

Nordics Are Israelites
4,000 English Books Say So! Free Saxon-Israel Books & Magazines
ChristsAssembly.com

Well, well, a representative from the Pentagon admits to Bob Woodward that there has been torture of a Guantanamo suspect.

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

(...)

Military prosecutors said in November that they would seek to refile charges against Qahtani, 30, based on subsequent interrogations that did not employ harsh techniques. But Crawford, who dismissed war crimes charges against him in May 2008, said in the interview that she would not allow the prosecution to go forward.

(...)

"For 160 days his only contact was with the interrogators," said Crawford, who personally reviewed Qahtani's interrogation records and other military documents. "Forty-eight of 54 consecutive days of 18-to-20-hour interrogations. Standing naked in front of a female agent. Subject to strip searches. And insults to his mother and sister."

At one point he was threatened with a military working dog named Zeus, according to a military report. Qahtani "was forced to wear a woman's bra and had a thong placed on his head during the course of his interrogation" and "was told that his mother and sister were whores." With a leash tied to his chains, he was led around the room "and forced to perform a series of dog tricks," the report shows.

(...)


The interrogation, portions of which have been previously described by other news organizations, including The Washington Post, was so intense that Qahtani had to be hospitalized twice at Guantanamo with bradycardia, a condition in which the heart rate falls below 60 beats a minute and which in extreme cases can lead to heart failure and death. At one point Qahtani's heart rate dropped to 35 beats per minute, the record shows.

(...)


"There's no doubt in my mind he would've been on one of those planes had he gained access to the country in August 2001," Crawford said of Qahtani, who remains detained at Guantanamo. "He's a muscle hijacker. . . . He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' "

You know, despite the fact that the prisoner is dangerous, if he has been tortured, and especially if he made confessions under torture, he should be released in compensation. In that case, it is the fault of the torturers and those who authorised the torture if he commits further abuses. If they didn't want him going free, then they shouldn't have tortured him or illegally detained him. They should have gathered evidence and put him on trial, like we do all other human beings who commit crimes. This is just one of the many many reasons torture is not just morally wrong, but illegal: you can't use it to get legally recognized confessions. 

the paradox of politics in the 21st century

...as seen from the year 1948:

as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. (...) But by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. And in the general hardening of outlook that set in round about 1930, practices which had been long abandoned, in some cases for hundreds of years — imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations-not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.
-- George Orwell, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" (in 1984)

Oh, and he pretty much sums up the whole Guantanamo- Abu-Ghraib- 9/11-changed-everything- schtick in there as well.

Here's a collection of George Orwell's essays. All of them should be read and some of them should be memorized.