----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Mensah" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 5:38 PM
Subject: [unioNews] Guantanamo: a symbol of US loss of values
Saturday, January 24, 2004
<H3>Guantanamo: a symbol of US loss of values</H3>
By Richard Cohen
<B><i>The US does not believe the old rules apply in the war against
terror.</i></B>
If you are about my age, you grew up on combat movies in which some
American POW told an enemy interrogator that he would supply only his
name, rank and serial number.
In the next breath, the American would cite the Geneva Convention in
demanding fair treatment of prisoners. Then, that sounded as American
as apple pie. Now, we're getting that pie in our face.
The reason, of course, is that the United States continues to hold
hundreds of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters at a special
military prison facility at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.
I emphasise the word "suspected," because already more than 80 of the
original 660 detainees have been released - a few to be jailed in
their home countries, most just to go free.
It's not clear if the Geneva Convention applies - or can apply - to
detainees who are not conventional prisoners of war.
After all, al-Qaeda is a terrorist organisation, not a state, and it
is not likely it will ever sign an armistice agreement ending
hostilities.
It's hard to believe that an al-Qaeda fighter, freed from Guantanamo,
would simply collect some doughnuts from the Red Cross and go home.
The nature of war has changed.
But not, I would hope, the nature of the United States. Yet for more
than two years now, the United States has been holding detainees
without the benefit of counsel when, the law of averages says, some
of them are bound to be innocent.
One of them might be David Hicks, a 28-year-old Australian who was
captured in Afghanistan in December 2001. It was not until last month
that Hicks was visited by his lawyer - the first time any Guantanamo
detainee had seen a lawyer.
It could be that Hicks, like some of the other detainees, was just in
the wrong place at the wrong time.
Whatever the case, this is where lawyers prove useful - and why
defendants in the United States are guaranteed the right to counsel.
Given enough time and enough pressure, even the innocent will confess
to something - anything just to end the isolation and deprivation.
From all accounts, Guantanamo is not a particularly harsh place. US
authorities don't go in for physical torture and all the Muslims are
allowed to pray.
But the isolation, the sheer hopelessness of the situation, has taken
its toll. Vanity Fair magazine reported last month that 20 per cent
on the detainees are on anti-depressants and that by the end of the
year, 32 of them had attempted suicide. In the end, jail is jail.
In any sort of sweep such as the kind the US and its allies conducted
in Afghanistan, the innocent are bound to be found among the guilty.
That's a mathematical truth - especially when Afghan warlords were
given bounties for captured Taliban. What did they care if they
hauled in some innocent characters? It is these people, the innocent
or the merely deluded, who are bound to be in Guantanamo - and have
been for at least two years now.
To an amazing degree, the word Guantanamo has become shorthand
throughout the world for American arrogance and unilateralism. We
insist that our POWs and others be treated by universally accepted
rules - the Geneva Convention, for instance. But when we capture some
people, we say the old rules don't apply.
No one better articulated American arrogance than Defence Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld who, when asked in January 2002 why the Geneva
Convention did not apply to the detainees, replied that he did not
have "the slightest concern" about the treatment after what they had
done.
The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-American news weekly, called
Rumsfeld's remarks "unworthy of a nation which has cherished the rule
of law from its very birth".
My own education in this matter came last October when I went to
visit the former president of Germany, Richard von Weizsaecker, at
his home in Berlin. Weizsaecker - both pro-American and adamant in
insisting that Germany face its past - answered all my questions but
then brought up one himself: Guantanamo: "What is the rule of law and
what is a human right?"
These are excellent questions - directed not at me, but at the
President and Congress alike. Both have been awfully slow to respond.
To Weizsaecker, Guantanamo represents an America that has turned its
back on its values. Anyone who watched the old war movies can only
agree.
***
Richard Cohen is a columnist with The Washington Post.
Copyright © 2004. The Age Company Ltd
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