A good collar
I've read many newspaper stories on various aspects of the United
States growing number of prisonors is its global war on terror, a great
many araticles. Despite the attempts of one player or
another to get on top of this issues and ride it someplace - it simply
isn't that well behaved a beast.
The initial issues were the riots in parts of the middle east that
triggered off Newsweek's (Michael Isikoff's) soon retracted story Gitmo: SouthCom Showdown - Newsweek Periscope. This
reaction laid bare a building undercurrent of mistrust in the islamic
world. Behind the Koran mistreatment story, there lay the rendition
issues, the Abu Ghraib issues (strategies of humiliation, secret hidden
prisoners Islam as interrogation tool: need for limits? | csmonitor.com. The 'Torture light' issues; the obscuring of the official
judical nature of detainee's. That they are not POWs in our war on
terror, but detainees signals a to many a troubling lack of
distinction, between enemies and those who are more nearly just
not friends. As though establishing this blank catagory for a
indistinct ill conceived war capable of having no clear end, that made
some difference against inalienable human rights .
At the heart of all this Gonzales and Rumsfeld's directives
establishing this, and permitting acceptable levels of torture. In a
recent Prickely City, a comic strip that runs in the Washington
Post, the two main characters land what Scott Santos must have believed
was a devastating moral blow against the administration's critics:
degradation of the Koran at Guatanamo how much 'they' want it to be
true. I don't need it to be true, But if I may ask: how is this
different from not wanting to see, refusing to see, and rationalizing
what, is seen, out of existence. The Administration and DOD's faux outrage is an overreach and it is
not sustinable in the face of what is already known, what DoD reports
will show soon, and what will be known in the course of time 1.
The current form this story has assumed lies with Amnesty
International's American Gulag comment, similarly an overreach. They
seemed to have figured this out too Amnesty USA backs off Gitmo
as 'gulag' Chicago Sun-Times. The debate Gulag or 'not Gulag' misses
point - we are already on that slippery slope - not about to step onto
it. Cheney is offended, President Bush declares it absurd, and Rumsfeld
rejects it out of hand. I've read "One Day in the Life of Ivan
Desonovich", I've read it a couple of times. I wouldn't discount
that just such a book isn't being written in some internment camp
somewhere right now. The administrations puzzling blindness
aside, this is increasing obvious to onlookers, especially outside the
united states. The United States no longer seem to stand for what it
once did. as the CS Monitor observed repeated pronouncements of our
delivery of freedom mean little unless it seems accompanyied by a
commitment to justice.
CS monitor sees this as a delibrately picked fight, something the
administration believes they have a handle on, and can make work for
them The image war over US detainees | csmonitor.com. It may be a well
crafted public relations counter-offensive. It may also be a marker of
how out of touch they are. I saw a recent book (I see a lot
of books in my job) a monograph on french concepts of penal systems in
the late 19th century. While affirming the states need and right for
imprisonment, and recourse to capital punishment in some situations, it
made the point that there is nothing that gives - can give - any state
the right to debase an incarcerarted person. Nothing! Such a right does
not exist in any concept of justice.
The Koran issue at Guantanamo Bay is a stalking horse (or a red
herring) Guantanamo Bay is the best possible face the administration
can put on their mass detainment of the islamic world. From that tiny
corner of Cuba it slips beyond the realm any formal rules or public
information, information they could allow to become public. Gitmo is
the firmest ground the administration has, they'd just as soon keep
attention focused here were they can fight a passable rear guard action
against public opinion. Sen. Pelosi (D-Ca), Sen. Biden (D-De) ,
Former President Jimmy Carter, are all calling for U.S. detention
center at Guantanamo Bay to be phased out. Even President Bush seems to
be signaling that's not out of the realm of the possible
Bush opens door to possible closing of Guantanamo . The laughed
Jimmy Carter out of this town thirty years ago, They may have been
partly right, they were certainly partly wrong. I haven't seen the
administration come to town and conclusively demonstrate they knew
more, about freedom or the human condition. When it comes to human rights Jimmy Carter speaks with more
gravitas than George Bush. That will remain true no matter how many
times his speech writers put the word freedom in his speeches.
_______
1. The intentions of the program in the end are not obsure enough. This
article documents an outline of the overall thinking to the approach. -RedNova News - Science - Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relationship.
The Guardian has an exerpt - The unknown unknowns of the Abu Ghraib scandal Seymour: The 10
inquiries into prisoner abuse have let Bush and Co off the hook -
from a forthcoming book by Seymour Hersh: Chain of Command which will
try to definatively demonstrate that all these separate abuse incidents
are really one policy.
1:15:42 AM  ;;
|
|
