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Category: War

Guantanamo Round-Up

We’re indefinitely detaining people; arguing that because they’re “enemy combatants” and because they aren’t on U.S. soil that they don’t deserve regular due process rights; and then asserting that they aren’t prisoners of war and therefore aren’t subject to the Geneva Conventions. (For the record, the U.S. government has also asserted that even U.S. citizens, apprehended on U.S. soil, don’t deserve due process rights if they’re deemed “enemy combatants”).

If the people being held at Guantanamo are so clearly the worst of the worst — and the government argues that they are — why not try them in criminal court? Or, if they’re captured abroad as prisoners of war, why not treat them as such? The creation of this flexible third category of prisoner sets a frightening standard.

Then we take it a step further and argue that torture is necessary to get information from these people, often invoking the “ticking time bomb” scenario — except that these people are being held for long periods of time, with no access to the outside. There is no ticking time bomb here. And regardless, torture is not justifiable.

And now we’re expanding the Guantanamo standard with our latest prison in Afghanistan.

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

The administration has been incredibly secretive about what goes on in these prisons. When the UN asks to see Guantanamo, Rumsfeld says sure — but you can’t see prisoners, or gather any information about what actually happens there. When the UN or Human Rights Watch or Amnesty or any of these other groups protest, Rumsfeld responds, “The International Red Cross was allowed in. They had access to prisoners, and look, they aren’t saying that people were abused.” Which naturally placates the average person — until you realize that the policy of the Red Cross is to never disclose what they see. They could have witnessed some of the most heinous human rights abuses possible, and they wouldn’t be releasing a memo about it.

Thankfully, this issue isn’t going away, and a few committed individuals are keeping it in the news. This week brings a handful of fantastic articles about Guantanamo, torture, and U.S. values. Check ’em out here, in order of how much I like them (If you read nothing else, read the New Yorker article in its entirety):

From The New Yorker — The Memo: How the Internal Effort to Ban the Abuse and Torture of Detainees Was Thwarted.

From the LA Times — American Gulag

Before Guantanamo: The U.S. policy of detention without trial had an earlier life — in South Africa under apartheid.

From the New York Times — Tortured Logic: No slope is more slippery, I learned in Iraq, than the one that leads to torture.

Part of the reason this bothers me so much is because I feel like we’re better than this. These are not the American values that I know, and this is not what Americans stand for. I don’t want to be attached to an ideology that promotes the torture of other human beings in the name of “national security,” or that brushes aside our most basic values for a little more flexibility. I think it’s irresponsible to put our soldiers in a position where, should they be captured, their captors will have no reason to think that the Geneva Conventions should apply — after all, if the U.S. isn’t following international law, why should they? I think it’s terrifying that we’re stepping all over basic constitutional rights, ignoring the treaties we signed to protect our own troops, and lowering our standards to barbaric levels. We’ve seen the dangers in shifting our basic ideas of due process and equal protection (hello there, Japanese-American internment), and across the globe we’ve witnessed the problems inherent in an unchecked executive power. And I have no doubt that Guantanamo and our current policies will be judged harshly, and will be looked back on shamefully.

Someone defend Guantanamo and the policies we exercise there. Explain it to me, please.

Posted in War

After Neoconservatism

A must-read article by Frances Fukuyama on the legacy of neoconservatism, and how it’s left the world much worse off.

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

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Daily Stupidity

What would international politics be without some nutbag (often godbag) doing something completely inane? Well, friends, today is no exception, as a Pakistani cleric has now offered a $1 million bounty on the head of the cartoonist responsible for those offensive Mohammed illustrations. I wonder if he realizes that the cartoons were drawn by 12 different people?

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, where riots left two dead and scores injured on Wednesday, prayer leader Mohammed Yousaf Qureshi announced the bounty for killing a cartoonist to about 1,000 people outside the Mohabat Khan mosque, where worshippers burned a flag of Denmark and an effigy of the Danish prime minister.

He said the mosque and his religious school would give $25,000 and a car, while a local jewelers’ association would give another $1 million. No representative of the association was available to confirm it had made the offer.

“This is a unanimous decision of by all imams (prayer leaders) of Islam that whoever insults the prophet deserves to be killed and whoever will take this insulting man to his end, will get this prize,” Qureshi said.

Which is a great plan, you know, when you live in an economically struggling nation where you still haven’t totally recovered from a major natural disater — offer a million bucks to kill some guy for drawing a picture instead of, say, getting clean water to a rural village or educating some of your kids.

Of course, it’s not exactly a big secret that Pakistani president Pervez Musharaff and his government funnel money to terrorist organizations, while simultaneously acting as a friend to President Bush and the United States (and, to be clear, I’m actually not being too critical of the Bush administration here — they do need a strategic alliance with Pakistan, they just need to do a better job at it). Of course, the terrorist groups funded by Pakistan spend most of their energy launching attacks on India and in Kashmir, though terrorist extraordinaire Osama bin Laden has certainly spent some time in Pakistan trying to get his hands on nuclear technology. (And as a slight sidenote, if the words “nuclear” and “crazy godbag government” scare you when used together in the same sentence, you might want to avoid reading this). But back to Pakistan: The bottom line is, when you create a culture where the government tacitly endorses these groups, you can’t be surprised when they extend beyond your borders.

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, chief of the radical group Jamaat al-Dawat, became the first religious leader detained by authorities since protests began in Pakistan early this month. He was due to make a speech in Faisalabad, about 75 miles away.

Intelligence officials have said scores of members of Jamaat al-Dawat and assorted militant groups joined protests in Lahore on Tuesday and had incited violence in a bid to undermine President Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s government.

And you can’t be surprised when they turn on you.

Thanks to Lauren for the link.

But Conservatives LOVE Free Speech

…don’t they? Well, they love it when it applies to Danish newspapers publishing anti-Muslim cartoons with the explicit purpose of mocking Islam, but they aren’t such big fans when it comes to, say, verbally criticizing our elected administration. Because that’s treason.

It is now considered bad form to criticize those who commit seditious acts against the United States. Challenging the patriotism of a traitor draws more ire than engaging in treasonable activities. Calling out those who undermine our nation creates more of a backlash than actually undermining our nation.

Ben cites a few quotes from Al Gore, John Kerry and Jim McDermott as examples of “sedition.” Now, you’d think that a Harvard law student would have a dictionary handy, and could look up the word “sedition” — because a pretty key component involves an intent to incite “rebellion agaisnt the authority of a state.” That isn’t what any of these three men did — they criticized U.S. policy, which, given the existence of the First Amendment, is a pretty fair thing for them to do.

At some point, opposition must be considered disloyal. At some point, the American people must say “enough.” At some point, Republicans in Congress must stop delicately tiptoeing with regard to sedition and must pass legislation to prosecute such sedition.

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Democracy Is Great, Until We Don’t Get What We Want

Here’s the problem with democratic elections in the Middle East: The most America-friendly, liberal, secular-minded politician isn’t always going to get elected. So we can support free elections, even if we recognize that we will sometimes be troubled by their outcomes, or we can install dictators and prop up corrupt but America-lovin’ regimes. What do you think the We *heart* Democracy GOP shills think about this one?

Well, friends, I give you Ben Shapiro.

This week, the terrorist group Hamas won an overwhelming electoral victory in the Palestinian Arab parliament election. Hamas, an organization that pledges to seek the destruction of the State of Israel, now holds 76 out of 132 seats in the relatively powerless legislative body.

This election gives the lie to two fallacious yet extremely influential ideas upon which American foreign policy has been based. First, the Arab/Israeli dispute remains intractable not because Palestinian Arab leadership is corrupt or evil (though it is), but because Palestinian Arabs, like their Muslim brethren across the globe, hate Israel and want the Jews thrown into the sea.

All Muslims hate all Jews. Why do I already doubt him?

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Dying to Avoid Rape

Female soldiers in Iraq are having to make an impossible choice: Risk being raped , or risk dying of dehydration. Many of them have ended up dead.

In a startling revelation, the former commander of Abu Ghraib prison testified that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former senior US military commander in Iraq, gave orders to cover up the cause of death for some female American soldiers serving in Iraq.

Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.

The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn’t located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom. “There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night,” Karpinski told retired US Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview.

It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers. So the women took matters into their own hands. They didn’t drink in the late afternoon so they wouldn’t have to urinate at night. They didn’t get raped. But some died of dehydration in the desert heat, Karpinski said.

Read the whole article.