Prisoners not of any conscience

The War on Terror continues to be based on values, but they're the wrong, un-American values. It's little surprise that the world's most powerful nation is seen as the world's most abusive. Witness this attack by the White House spokesman:

"There have been some in the Democratic Party who have argued against the Patriot Act, against the terror surveillance program, against Guantanamo. In other words, there are some people who say that we shouldn't fight the war, we should not detain -- we shouldn't apprehend al Qaeda, we shouldn't detain al Qaeda, we shouldn't question al Qaeda, and we shouldn't listen to al Qaeda. In other words, they're all for winning the war on terror, but they're all against -- they're against providing the tools for winning that war.

Either you're for the prison at Guantanamo, or you're against America and winning the war on terror.

This is the same prison, of course, that was declared a home of torture; the same prison that for a time hosted an American citizen, while the government tried to prevent access to lawyers and legal hearings; the same prison in which compliance with international law is considered "special priveleges"; the same prison where inmates are expected to tell the warden of their sins, because neither side knows.

Besides being morally wrong, this is hurting the War on Terror. Witness today's Boston Globe report:

On the Pakistan side of the border the hatred and mistrust of America are , if anything, more bitter and intense. Here, as in Afghanistan, the search for bin Laden and his allies relies primarily on informants and local alliances. Both are hard to come by.

New enemies, on the other hand, seem born every day.

In a tiny hamlet here, a story is told and retold of the suffering of a local baker, Shah Mohammed, who was imprisoned in Guantanamo. He has become part of the local lore that shapes the image of America as a brutal empire and fuels the hatred that inspires militants.

A native son of the village, Shah Mohammed, was a handsome, outgoing man when he set off in 2000 for Afghanistan and ended up working in a bakery for the Taliban government. He was caught up in the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the Taliban in November of 2001, he says, and US forces picked him up near Mazar-e-Sharif . He was hooded, handcuffed, and eventually bundled off to Guantanamo, where, he says, he was stripped, beaten, and tortured. He attempted suicide four times in the year or so he was at Guantanamo, he says.

Eventually, his US captors researched his stated alibis and deemed him no threat. And so he was released, but his mind and spirit were broken, his family says.

In an interview, Mohammed, 26, spoke in disjointed sentences and repeated over and over, ``I am a baker of bread."

His uncle, Han Mohammed, 40, said, ``This is not the same Shah Mohammed that he was before. People are angry. Why did they do this to an innocent man?"

As a small crowd gathered in his tiny grocery store, the uncle fumed, ``Osama [bin Laden] is a hero for Muslims. That is what we believe. . . . America is no hero at all. If America was a hero, it would have helped this man who they harmed."

This is our way of getting aid in finding bin Laden? This is answering the war on terror? This is developing new allies? This is keeping us safe? This is keeping the War on Terror from looking like a war on Islam?

Let's turn back to that White House spokesman:

"There have been some in the Democratic Party who have argued against the Patriot Act, against the terror surveillance program, against Guantanamo. In other words, there are some people who say that we shouldn't fight the war, we should not detain -- we shouldn't apprehend al Qaeda, we shouldn't detain al Qaeda, we shouldn't question al Qaeda, and we shouldn't listen to al Qaeda. In other words, they're all for winning the war on terror, but they're all against -- they're against providing the tools for winning that war.

argued against the Patriot Act ... Perhaps because portions were ruled illegal? Is it now wrong to disparage unconstitutional laws?

against the terror surveillance program ... Perhaps because it was ruled illegal? Is it now wrong to disparage unconstitutional laws?

against Guantanamo? Perhaps because the United States Supreme Court ruled it illegal as violations of international and military law, and four members of the Supreme Court think it could be unconstitutional? (Read Page 10.) Is it now wrong to disparage illegal and possibly unconstitutional laws?

So, clearly, the White House spokesman's arguments are completely full of shit in re the U.S. Constitution. There have been reports, too, that Bush has argued the Constitution is a "goddamned piece of paper" that shouldn't keep getting in his way.

Let's go back to part of the rest of that White House statement, though:

In other words, there are some people who say that we shouldn't fight the war, we should not detain -- we shouldn't apprehend al Qaeda, we shouldn't detain al Qaeda, we shouldn't question al Qaeda, and we shouldn't listen to al Qaeda.

Really? Which people said we shouldn't question and detain al Qaeda? MeTheSheeple is still waiting, eagerly, to see prison sentences for al Qaeda convicts. Instead, we're seeing Afghan bakers getting beaten and a miserable rate of conviction and prison sentences, with the median prison sentence for terror crimes falling under 20 days. Last time we checked, the Bush administration alone does not have the power to decide that everyone it wants to call al Qaeda is really al Qaeda. This isn't the American justice system.

So what of that last bit of the White House spokesman's attack?

In other words, they're all for winning the war on terror, but they're all against -- they're against providing the tools for winning that war.

How many tools for winning the war did that baker in Afghanistan bring?

Destinations

Jon Stewart on The Daily Show had a hilarious riff about some pretty serious business, the suicide of three American-held not-quite-prisoners-of-war, but maybe-not-criminals at Guantanamo Bay.

Now, there's some debate about just how many Gitmo prisoners are actually "enemy combatants," a phrase that has no basis in law. Nevertheless, these guys are being held in the war on terror, which, from the bad guys' side, resembles a guerrilla war. Without a doubt, those guys recognize the value of publicity, such that they target reporters for kidnappings because they know it will get disproportionate coverage.

All that said, that same idea can be taken to an extreme -- and, unfortunately, was, by an American bureaucrat: "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good P.R. move to draw attention." All this, of course, comes from Colleen Graffy. A deputy assistant secretary of state. For public diplomacy. Who works for the person appointed by the American president to improve America's image abroad. It ain't working:

In Britain, where Graffy made her remarks, the reaction has been particularly negative, and calls for the closure of Guantanamo have gotten louder. A Reuters-UK article on the subject noted, "Nine British citizens have been held in Guantanamo Bay. All returned to Britain and none has been charged.

Several appeared in media interviews over the weekend in which they said they were not surprised that inmates had killed themselves."

If only as a "good PR move", it's time for the Bush Administration to close Guantanamo down.

A Washington Post columnist cites the case of one of those British prisoners, Moazzam Begg:

"It is considered a sin in Islam to despair," he writes, but after he was transferred to a solitary cell at Guantanamo in 2003, Begg began to crack. The guards seemed obsessed with preventing suicide. Begg received an odd plastic blanket, for example, and later learned that it was a "suicide blanket" that couldn't be torn up to make a noose. When guards found paint chipped in his cell, they worried that he was trying to poison himself.

A prison psychiatrist explained to Begg that there had indeed been suicide attempts: "She told me there were people who'd lost all sense of time, reason, reality; people who had been kept in a solitary cell, completely blocked off with no window, eight foot by six, like mine, but with absolutely nobody to speak to, nobody. She said some of them just ended up talking to themselves." A despairing Begg writes at one point to his father back in England: "I still don't know what crime I am supposed to have committed. . . . I am in a state of desperation and I am beginning to lose the fight against depression and hopelessness."

This doesn't do much for the arguments that the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. The Washington Post's David Ignatius sums up Gitmo:

When I hear U.S. officials describe the suicides of three Muslim prisoners at Guantanamo Bay last Saturday as "asymmetric warfare" and "a good PR move," I know it's time to close that camp -- not just because of what it's doing to the prisoners but because of how it is dehumanizing the American captors.

The American officials spoke of the dead prisoners as if they inhabited a different moral universe. That's what war does: People stop seeing their enemies as human beings and consign them to a different category. It was discomfiting to see this indifference stated so bluntly, and subsequent U.S. statements tactfully disavowed the initial ones.

Speaking about a different context, Sen. John McCain argued that the United States needs to keep a true moral superiority: "If they could, Islamic extremists who resort to terror would destroy us utterly. But to defeat them we must prevail in our defense of American political values as well. The mistreatment of prisoners greatly injures that effort. The mistreatment of prisoners harms us more than our enemies."

Showing Muslims what America stands for

Boston lawyer Melissa Hoffer has an op-ed column in today's Globe that should shock anyone who still believes in this country.

This time last year, Hadj's 6 -year-old daughter, Saaima, died of congenital heart failure. He had not seen her since the fall of 2001, when he and the other five men were arrested by Bosnian authorities under pressure from the United States, which asserted that they were involved in planning terrorist activities in Bosnia. After a three-month investigation, the Bosnian federal prosecutor recommended to the Bosnian Supreme Court that all six be released. But again under heavy pressure from the United States, the Bosnians caved, and as the men were released from a jail in Sarajevo, the Bosnians turned them over to the United States. Hooded, shackled, and packed into waiting cars while their horrified families watched, they began the sickening odyssey that continues today.

Saber's wife was pregnant when he was taken to Guantanamo. He has never met his daughter Sara, whose shiny face framed in pink plastic sunglasses peers out from the photographs we send to him. Mustafa, a former karate champion who suffered months of facial paralysis from a brutal beating inflicted by Guantanamo camp soldiers, worries about his ailing mother in Algeria. With each passing day, it becomes more likely that he will never see her again.

Not one of these men has been charged with a crime.

This is appalling, simply appalling. This is brought to us by an administration that keeps saying, "Trust us!" blunder after blunder. This is the same Guantanamo that beat a baker to the point where he tried to kill himself ... and again ... and again ... and again.

This Christian Science Monitor article from 2001, "Why Do They Hate Us?", seems stunningly prescient today:

And voices across the Muslim world are warning that if America doesn't wage its war on terrorism in a way that the Muslim world considers just, America risks creating even greater animosity. ...
The vast majority of Muslims in the Middle East were as shocked and horrified as any American by what they saw happening on their TV screens. And they are frightened of being lumped together in the popular American imagination with the perpetrators of the attack.

But from Jakarta to Cairo, Muslims and Arabs say that on reflection, they are not surprised by it. And they do not share Mr. Bush's view that the perpetrators did what they did because "they hate our freedoms."

Rather, they say, a mood of resentment toward America and its behavior around the world has become so commonplace in their countries that it was bound to breed hostility, and even hatred.

Meanwhile, our freedoms disappear.

Bastardization

I was appalled to read today's Boston Globe with a mention of how the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Guantanamo Bay detainees is being spun into "special privileges for terrorists." The Washington Post has more.

What the hell happened to those freedoms the terrorists hated? Following international law in just a handful of cases isn't anything too terrifying. This is coming on the backs of earlier reversals of the administration, which wanted to keep lawyers and evidence from U.S. citizens.

It was this sort of junk that led American colonialists to rebel against Britain, making these lands a beacon for freedom and basic human rights. Now, just a couple of centuries later, we Americans are flipping those ideals and ideas on their heads, then insulting anyone who supports them.

Some of the Gitmo detainees are undoubtedly bad people. Some of them are undoubtedly not bad people. It's up to a fair trial to determine, in a process that treats them as humans with some native rights. America is in a war of ideas, and the other side thinks we persecute Muslims unfairly. Isn't it a better idea to follow our nation's founding ideals, show the world a better method, and reduce the hatred for being a bunch of hypocritical bastards?

Justice on American soil

The Associated Press analyzed some 5,000 pages of Guantanamo Bay transcripts. Sure, nearly every true criminal says he's innocent. Yet some of this is just odd. Saying an Afghan is a terrorist soldier because he has a gun is like clamping down on drunk driving in America by arresting everyone with a car. The AP's reporters talked to one attorney who saw some classified evidence in a case with particularly serious charges:

"It was underwhelming," Hunt said, adding that he is barred from discussing the evidence, even with his client, Pakistani millionaire Saifullah Paracha. Paracha is accused of laundering money for al-Qaida and plotting to smuggle explosives into the United States.

This passage jumped out at me:

What is clear from the transcripts is the frustration of detainees trying to defend themselves against often unsubstantiated accusations.

Mohammed Sharif, an Afghan, was accused of guarding a Taliban camp. He denied it — and urged the military tribunal to produce the classified evidence against him. An unidentified tribunal member seemed as mystified as Sharif.

"Q: You mentioned that if we had facts or proof against you, you would understand why you were a prisoner, is that correct?

"A: Yes.

"Q: What could you have possibly done, that we might discover some of those facts?

"A: That's my point. There are no facts ... This is ridiculous. I know for a fact there is no proof."

Contrary to Fidel Castro's claims, Gitmo is on United States soil. I am appalled that the processes in America are so competely screwed up that a trial judge has to ask a defendant what he did wrong. Neither one of them knows.

I'm told by our nation's leaders that America represents freedom, openness, democracy. I'm told that America's enemies hate us for that. Witness this passage from President George W. Bush in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks:

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

I'm not sure the outcome is certain, or the good guys are always good guys.

What Jill Carroll might try to teach us

It's odd that I feel less odd, as a recovering reporter, in publishing opinion than as I do in publishing something factually accurate but politically incorrect.

Within a few days, an honest, hard-working woman may be beheaded by the Iraqi people she wants so badly to understand.

The kidnapping and threatened execution of Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, is reprehensible at so many levels; her translator was executed without debate. But just as Carroll strove to help her reader understand every side's motivation, her kidnapping offers a sad but useful time to understand why the Iraqi insurgents do not see America as a knight in shining armor riding to the rescue of repressed people everywhere, bearing American fairness and democracy.

By now, every American should be familiar with how their leaders cherry-picked the intelligence to justify a war in Iraq. President George W. Bush has offered one justification of war after another, beginning with weapons of mass destruction, and moving on to terrorism, democracy, human rights abuses and Middle East stability. Only the first argument was really made before the war, as a justification for the war; it has been discredited thoroughly.

From beyond this nation's borders, America's reputation is blackened. At best, others regard this nation as one prone to arrogant and ignorant abuses of power. Others see, simply, a nation beset with imperialist and anti-Muslim ambitions.

Afghanistan may represent those fears more than even the convoluted Iraq example. The United States invaded Afghanistan a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, neglecting earlier opportunities to destroy the soldiers training in al Qaeda camps, argues Michael Scheuer in “Imperial Hubris.” Scheuer, the former leader of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit, points to bigger problems abroad as the United States overthrew a Muslim government running under Islamic law and put in place polices anathemic to Muslim doctrine, such as equality for women.

“Also catastrophic to U.S. credibility is her new, almost blithely acquired reputation as the restorer – sacrificing that of the killer – of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonialism, as the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and domination of the Arabian Peninsula ensures a supply of cheap oil to the U.S.-led West,” Scheuer wrote.

And what of those human rights issues in Afghanistan? The United States has torn from power the abusive Taliban government, but a weak system of warlords remains. Of 27 U.S. soldiers identified for prosecution in the deaths of two Afghan prisoners in U.S. custody in 2002, one has gotten prison time. One summary run by the Malaysia Sun reads in part: “The overall case, the newspaper said, shows the difficulty of addressing the issue. The prisoners were severely beaten, but by so many guards that it was impossible to say who exactly caused the deaths.”

That update came at nearly the same time the United Nations condemned the way the United States handled prisoners, many of them from Afghanistan, at the Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba. One U.N. expert who worked on the study, Manfred Nowak, said that “there are no conclusions that are easily drawn. But we concluded that the situation in several areas violates international law and conventions on human rights and torture.” None of this is really new. The American government created a new category of prisoners not found elsewhere in international law, a decision protested years ago. The government also blocked efforts to provide lawyers to Yasser Hamdi and John Walker Lindh, both of whom held American citizenship.

None of these kinds of abuses are new to American history, although Americans often don't know about it. In a best-selling book centered around a group of American pilots including George H.W. Bush, author James Bradley describes sets the stage with descriptions of atrocities and imperialist actions by both the Japanese and the Americans. In “Flyboys,” Bradley points out that a century ago Americans killed Filipino men, women and children in an uprising at the rate of 7,000 per month, or the same rate as the United States' combat losses in World War II against the mechanized forces of Japan and Germany. By the time the Filipino uprising was ended, more than 250,000 people were dead. Prisoners were routinely executed. Americans pioneered a torture technique, to simulate drowning, which evolved into today's “waterboarding.”

Have those abuses stopped? Bush fought Congress over a ban on torture, then approved it with a “signing statement.” With that, he ultimately agreed to prohibit torture, except in cases when he just didn't want to.

Today's jihadis in Iraq can take a critical look at America's claims that it will bring human rights benefits to Iraq. They can see a recent history built on lies or half-truths, a broad record of abuses against Muslim people, and a history of imperialism and repression.

Some of this undoubtedly influenced some of Jill Carroll's kidnappers, who hold her hostage as a representative of America. Carroll has sought to understand all sides in the conflict. A better understanding of every side's approaches and history would benefit both Americans and the rest of the world. Hopefully, Carroll will soon be freed to continue the holistic education that the entire world so woefully and terribly needs.