Guantanamo and human rights: Practicing what we preach - by Jim Rice
Guantanamo Bay has become not only a symbol of the U.S. government’s hypocrisy and dishonesty - or “disassembling,” as President Bush might put it - around the war on terror. The prison camp has become one of the more egregious examples of the cost of unaccountable power.
Human rights groups have long documented the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, including desecration of the Quran. (The International Committee of the Red Cross issued credible reports in 2002 and 2003 on mistreatment of the Islamic holy book, which last week even the Pentagon admitted.)
The 540 prisoners at the facility have been held incommunicado, denied access to legal counsel, and, in fact, denied the most basic aspects of legal process. The Bush administration has given mutually contradictory rationalizations for its treatment of prisoners there, claiming on the one hand that those incarcerated are effectively prisoners of war and in other circumstances that they are terrorist criminals. Yet the administration has refused to honor either the Geneva Conventions for treatment of POWs or the rights granted the accused under U.S. criminal law.
Defenders of Guantanamo and the policies it represents are quick to point out that our treatment of prisoners is far better than that meted out by the U.S.’s terrorist enemies - or the “gulag” of the former Soviet Union, for that matter. Fair enough. But if the U.S. is to continue to claim a place as a world leader for human rights, our standards must be infinitely higher and conform to or surpass international norms. We must not be satisfied with merely being “better” than al Qaeda or Stalin.
Former President Jimmy Carter has joined human rights groups, led by Amnesty International and others, in calling for the closing of Guantanamo Bay. “The U.S. continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to our reputation…because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo,” Carter said, according to an A.P. report. President Bush refused to rule out the closing of the facility, saying the administration was “exploring all alternatives” for detaining the prisoners.
Guantanamo should be closed. But simply closing the facility - and either moving the detainees to another location or returning them to their country of origin - is not enough. If the United States is to regain any credibility as an advocate of human rights around the world, it must begin to practice what it preaches in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Guantanamo, and everywhere else. The erosion of respect for human rights by U.S. personnel didn’t begin at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, and the responsibility for it goes all the way to the top.
14 Comments
We have been round this tree before.
If you run out dressed in your civilian clothes without any ID/markings( per Geneva Rules of War ), whip out a hidden AK47 and start shooting at uniformed forces you are not considered a POW.
In WWII you have been shot on the spot as a spy not detained.
Again, I am not endorsing Anything.
Your reference article refers to the detainees as POWs per Geneva Rules, that is the only thing I am taking issue with.
I’ve collected a 5 gallon bucket of piss and just purchased a brand new shiny Quran, now if I could get some federal funding I could go ahead with my art project…
What reputation? The U.S. has long been the Great Satan. Remember, how 9/11 was supposed to help the U.S. reflect on its long standing inhumane foreign policies against Islamic people. You know, like supporting a nation that has resisted and defeated Arab imperialism. Or maybe the U.S. should stop that too.
“Our standards must be infinitely higher”, says Jim Rice which is an obvious physical impossibility and yet it is the standard the the United State’s enemies unfairly demand.
Who is Jim Rice? Why is gulag in quotes?
Right on especially on the ” Art Project “!
Here is another for a free expressive
art project - “Piss Mohammed “!
Nate, you have to understand their double standard pc BS bias and piss bible is expressionism, piss koran is hateful racism.
Dave, I really can’t believe that last comment. Since you brought up pissing on the Bible (no one else did, by the way, so I don’t see any double standard being applied), by your own logic, we should apply the same standard of judgment to both offenses (urinating on either book). Since I’m guessing you would not condone pissing on the Bible, you must agree that doing so to the Quran is wrong as well. As for the rest of that last comment, it doesn’t exactly take a well educated “liberal” to sniff out the glaring racism it contains, joking or not.
As for your first comments regarding the nature of their imprisonment (POW, “enemy combatant”, etc.) please don’t parrot the same propaganda here that you’ve apparently been led to believe (by whom?). I can pretty much guarantee that few (or no) Guantanamo detainees got there because they “whipped out an AK47 and started shooting at unarmed (?)forces” - the military doesn’t take those people prisoner, they shoot them.
By the administration’s own admission, many of the detainees were taken captive based on the word of informants, etc. (hence the “gulag” references - see my post below on this), NOT because of anything they have been proven to have done. I really get sick of the constant labeling of these prisoners as violent terrorists, when it’s just not true. Sure, SOME of them may be, but since we aren’t allowing them to have trials (or any outside communication for that matter), we’ll never know which is which will we?
Just in case you’re still under the impression that all these prisoners ARE dangerous terrorists, and that it’s therefore OK that we choose not to present any evidence and move directly from accusation to sentencing, I’d ask you to explain why we’ve released 234 of them so far, admitting that they were not a threat. “Oh, sorry for taking you away from your families without warning, and holding you here (and torturing you) for a few years without even letting them know what happened to you. Our mistake”.
Guantanamo is a human rights disgrace. I find it interesting that you guys respond by making jokes about it; I don’t really think it’s very funny. Do you really refuse to acknowledge the plain evidence that this is wrong?
I guess you think of me as un-American for pointing it out too, but I’m curious how far you are willing to see our government go before you stand up and call on them to stop? Doing so in no way implies taking sides with those who oppose us, so please don’t respond to my raising this issue by pointing out the fact that other countries do bad stuff too. Of course they do, but that doesn’t justify us doing them, does it?
I joke because this is a joke. Guantanamo is not a human rights disgrace but you and the others insist on making it one. Have you read anything about the report the pentagon released about Quran desecration’s (the first thing Mr. Rice mentioned). They were so minor it’s funny, even the liberal media started laughing at the folks who insist Guantanamo is a “gulag”. (A term I find is disgraceful to the entire cultures who suffered under them. Let’s riot Ukrainians!)
You blame the Bush administration for using scare tactics to win public approval, but you are doing the same thing. Stop crying wolf and when there is a real reason to call the U.S. a fascist, police state that tramples on human rights then maybe people will listen.
Where’s the Red Cross in all this? How did the prisoners manage to file civil suites against the U.S. government? How come some prisoners are released and say they were treated fine?
There has been a great deal of documentation regarding the abuses at Guantanamo, here is a good summary of a lot of them. It’s not isolated incidents. The primary problem though, (even if you choose to dismiss the torture rumors) is the complete lack of legal process that the prisoners are afforded, and the fact that they are indefinitely imprisoned without even being formally charged with any crime, much less tried. The Supreme Court agrees.
No one is saying that it’s equal to the actual gulags such as the ones that Soviet prisoners suffered in, just that they are similar in that you don’t have to be convicted of an actual crime to be locked away for years without a trial, only accused. I wonder if you would think it was funny if you got arbitrarily picked off the street and thrown into jail without contact with your family for years without a trial, whether or not your Bible got peed on.
Don’t bother trying to dispute this, because the administration admits that this is the case and defends the practice, in the name of “fighting the war on terror” - which is the real joke here.
Interesting that you mentioned the Red Cross too, since they have been the only organization given any kind of access to the detainees, and have strongly condemned it on multiple occasions (here, here, and on their own site here), every time they are allowed in to visit. They also included criticism related to the recent allegations of the book incidents.
As for people being released and saying they were treated fine, I haven’t read those reports; please provide links. But, even if there were some reports of people being treated well, that is by no means an indication that ALL detainees were treated well. I’m sure you could probably dig up a few former Soviet prisoners in their gulags who said they didn’t have it all that bad either.
Defacing either book is wrong.
The network medis liberal press power structure has a double standard as is seen in they way they have treated stories about urine on both books.
The rest we have discussed and I cant even read it without my glasses and I jsut dont want to as we have done this before.
I have said what I needed. I respect your opinions and your view, I dont always agree.
We are both at a “loss” as to what to do now and how we personally can help bring an end to the killing. By ” arguing ” here does no good in my view ( you probably already said that above ) and probably does harm to some.
Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember any news stories (liberal or otherwise) about peeing on the Bible. I would be interested in reading one if you have one though.
I think you should change a statement you made from “the complete lack of legal process” to “a legal process that I personally don’t agree with.” You linked to an article, published on June 28,2004, about a Supreme Court decision that ruled against the Bush administration and their position on trying detainees. The article noted:
Are you saying that nothing has been done in order to provide trials at Guantanamo to that are compliant with the courts decision? There was a more recent (February 1, 2005) article linked to from the “Gulag Watch” web site that indicates that the Pentagon has attempted comply with the Supreme Court ruling even though some lawyers disagree.
I’ve also read a report about lawyers going in large numbers to Guantanamo to provide legal counsel. An ability they have because of last years court rulings I assume. Are they somehow not being allowed to give counsel to the detainees? The article doesn’t indicate that:
You also claim the the prisoners are given no contact to their family, yet in the link you provided to the ICRC website they state:
The one thing that I do see as a common thread through the articles you have cited and websites that you have referenced is an involvement of multiple organizations (FBI, CIA, Pentagon, JAG, ICRC), a high level of government transparency, and appropriate judicial oversight. Jim Rice started his article by calling Guantanamo “one of the more egregious examples of the cost of unaccountable power.” Unaccountable power? How so? Sounds to me like misleading political statement intended to scare the public and fuel anti-Americanism. Unfortunately, statements like that (and any reference to a gulag) lessen his credibility and take away from his accusations that guilt for Guantanamo abuse “goes all the way to the top,” as well as your argument that the reported abuses are “not isolated incidents.”
Here’s the link to the article that I read that mentioned prisoners who had no complaints of their treatment at Guantanamo: http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20050602-085745-2130r.htm
As a side note, unless I’m mistaken I think you misquoted Dave Z:
“If you run out dressed in your civilian clothes without any ID/markings( per Geneva Rules of War ), whip out a hidden AK47 and start shooting at *uniformed forces* you are not considered a POW.”
vs.
“whipped out an AK47 and started shooting at *unarmed (?)force*.”
Is that a quote from anther time and place?
Anyway, I only bring it up because you later escalated your rhetoric in response to my comment and insinuated that people have been “arbitrarily picked off the street and thrown into jail.” A statement that is very far from the truth.
Also, did I ever say anything that you consider racist? I would like to know.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ
Although I think more people took issue with the fact that this was funded by NEA not that the piece of junk had the words “piss” and “Christ” in it. I would defend the artist’s right to waste his time any way he pleases, but don’t spend my tax dollars doing it.
Anyway, what is so terrible about treating a Quran or a Bible in a “disgraceful” way? I don’t think the military should make a practice of it, but labeling it a “human rights violation” is a stretch.
No wonder I didn’t remember the urine scandal - it was from 1987.
I wasn’t saying that the peeing thing was a human rights violation, I was saying that the way they have run the detention center was. The peeing thing just highlights the attitude of the people in charge, as do the smiling faces of the soldiers involved in the actual torture photos we’ve all seen. That kind of activity is absolutely condoned by the chain of command. If it wasn’t, I guarantee you that no soldier (who know what can happen to them if they do things their CO’s don’t approve of) would take the enormous risk of photographing themselves and their friends committing these acts if they didn’t completely believe that they were justified, and even ordered to behave in that manner.
The military tribunals are largely a farce, consisting of secret evidence that is not allowed to be challenged (or even examined) and allegations. Even the judges in the tribunals were frustrated with the issues of mistaken identity and inaccurate information. Interesting excerpt:
Here is a list of more of their court documents. Another excerpt:
Also, I applaud the recent developments allowing real attorneys to have access to the detainees in order to represent them, but it should be noted that this was vigorously opposed by the administration, and only ended up happening because the Supreme Court ruled against the administration, who continued to maintain that the detainees did not deserve such protections. So I guess my criticism of the administration’s position stands.
The article you referenced above makes this point rather well, in the sentence directly above the one you quoted:
Sorry, but I’m not going to give them “good guy credit” for something that they were basically were forced to do and fought in court.
If they are also now (after years) being allowed to send messages to their families, then that is also commendable, but again, this is only happening as the result of the injustices being brought to light and talked about (by the Red Cross and others). The administration had previously vigorously defended their policy of not allowing any communication, and this development only highlights the value in speaking out against the injustice (like I’m attempting to do here), so that it can be corrected, whether it be by the pressure of public opinion or by the Supreme Court.
The unaccountable power issue is still an important one. The organizations you mentioned (except for the Red Cross) are all United States military and/or government organizations, which don’t provide adequate accountability, and they are certainly not “accountable” to the Red Cross, other than eventually having to change their policies out of either sheer embarrassment or judicial decisions that come about from the RC bringing the truth to light. The progress in the judicial arena is encouraging in the area of accountability, I will admit, but I think the accountability the author was referring to was one of an international scale. I doubt that we would accept it if Saddam (or other such bad guys) told us that he was “accountable” to several various departments internal to their own governments. We would (and have) demanded to hold them to account from the outside, but we continue to refuse to submit to anyone else in like manner. Remember our refusal to allow our soldiers to be tried for war crimes in international courts, back before this whole thing started?
As for people being “arbitrarily picked off the street and thrown into jail”, I guess I should amend that and say that they were picked off the street and thrown in jail without any real evidence, only the unsubstantiated word of someone else or the suspicion of the military officers, but it sure would seem “arbitrary” to the innocent person when they are getting picked up for no reason. Even the administration and the military have admitted to this kind of mistake being made, so I wouldn’t call it “very far from the truth”.
My quote of Dave (although not an exact quote) was partially a misunderstanding on my part, since I didn’t go back and read or copy/paste what he said. My response remains the same, however (and even more sure now that I know what he was saying): anyone shooting an AK47 at US military forces did not make it to Guantanamo. Again this is my point: everyone talks about how it’s OK that these detainees aren’t being treated fairly, since they are all violent terrorist killers. The author of the extremely slanted article on a select few detainees who couldn’t personally confirm the allegations of mistreatment resorts to this same sort of inflammatory rhetoric when she quotes and agrees with General Myers, who says of the detainees:
Talk about “misleading political statement intended to scare the public” - that’s it in a nutshell.
I don’t recall you saying anything racist; that was a response to the Mohamed reference by Dave.
OK, I need to stop typing now, because Martha’s getting mad at me, and like I said before, I don’t really see this conversation going anywhere anyway. I’ve said many times before that I’m not trying to incite any kind of anti-American feelings, just pointing out the truth in hopes of the kind of positive turns we have seen, like you have pointed out (increase in lawyer access and detainee communications).
BWAHAHAHA !!!
What the heck was that?