Gulag Guantanamo

I haven’t commented on Guantanamo for a while so here goes: the United Nations has just condemned the U.S. for keeping the detention camp “Gitmo” open. The U.N. press release is here: Gitmo Press Release. The New York Times has the full report here: The full U.N. report

They are absolutely right, of course. Gitmo and all it represents is an abomination. It is a constant contradiction of American freedoms and an ongoing source of aggravation in the Middle East. America cannot and will not begin to turn around Arab sentiment while Gitmo remains open. I suppose these massive costs would be vaguely worth it were there benefits accruing from maintaining the camp. There are not.

The majority of prisoners in the camp have no valuable intelligence. Nor can they be classified in any way as terrorists at the time they were taken into custody. A recent study of the inmates, conducted by journalists at the National Journal, concludes that as many as 80% of the inmates never had any al-Qaida connection and many were never even Taliban soldiers. They have no value at all to the U.S., and most probably were never “enemy comabatants”, which is what George Bush keeps referring to them as.

Most of the prisoners were not captured by American soldiers, but were “sold” to the U.S. in return for rewards by various warlords in Afghanistan. It is highly questionable that some of these peole ever had anything to do with combat against the U.S., they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Their continued incarceration is often based on the flimmsiest and frankly dumbest pretense: one prisoner admitted to having seen Bin Laden five times, and so his file reads that: “Detainee admitted to knowing Osama Bin Laden”. The trouble is that he admitted to seeing Bin Laden on the TV! Surely the U.S. officials who compiled the file are not serious about this man’s association with Bin Laden. Yet his continued detention suggests that they are. This kind of thing makes a mockery of any words Bush et al might say to the contrary.

A second study, published by Seton Hall university professors who represent a couple of the prisoners concludes that 55% of the prisoners are not suspected of ever having committed any hostile acts against the U.S. This study also highlights the “captured for bounty” fate of many prisoners: fully 86% of all of them were captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance during the time the bounties were being paid.

It gets worse: some of the prisoners are being detained for having owned a Kalashnikov rifle: you only have to watch TV to realize that Kalashnikovs are a dime a dozen in the Middle East. [I imagine there are quite a few sitting around in the U.S. also.].

The U.N. report condemns the U.S. as violating numerous human rights including the ban on torture, arbitrary detention, and the right to a fair trial. This condemnation is an embarrassment to all Americans. How is it that there is not more outrage? Were Gitmo to be operated by the Soviet Union it would rapidly have become an iconic rallying point for the freedom loving American public in their contempt for the “evil empire” so vilified by Ronald Reagan. The hypocrisy is sickening.

Still, even with all this documentation Bush continues to deny that anything is wrong. Instead he berates the U.N. and anyone else who criticizes the camp. He allows the camp to go on acting as a perverse symbol of American attitudes towards Islam, as a source of anger to fuel anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East, and as a stark contradiction of previously cherished American values.

The prisoners in Gitmo may be enemies of the U.S. If so they should be subjected to the kind of punishment the vaunted American legal system is capable of. They should not be non-people, an American version of “the disappeared” of totalitarian regimes in South America: outside the law, unrepresented, helpless, and facing interminable detention.

Guantanamo is wicked. The U.N. is correct. America should not operate a gulag system. It is time to shut the place down and apologize for its exsistence.