Last week, former US President Clinton joined the swelling chorus within the US demanding the closure of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Either that or clean the place up, he said. The constant abuse stories coming out of it has to stop.
Hardly are the words out of his mouth then, fast on the heels of the Qur’an desecration stories, come new shocking allegations about Guantanamo.
The New York Times claims that doctors and other mental health professionals there have been working not for well being of detainees, but to help interrogators refine their techniques. They have been advising interrogators how best to turn up the psychological pressure on individual prisoners, working on their fears and phobias.
These are the sort of wickedness that would have shocked no one in the old Soviet Union — the “evil empire” as the late President Reagan so aptly put it. But the US? No one wants to refer to it in such a overtly malicious way, but these allegations are stark evidence to the fact that something has gone drastically wrong in the US in the past four years.
The use of doctors to increase stress levels on detainees, to find out their phobias so that they can then be used against them, is nothing short of psychological torture.
Guantanamo is America’s shame. It has become a blot on its character. So it is not surprising that more and more Americans are demanding that it be closed. Its calculated position outside the US legal system makes a mockery of American justice and of all that Americans themselves are proud. It is legal hypocrisy in barbed wire and watchtowers.
It is dire threat too to Americans themselves. If Washington can twist the law to place terrorists outside the scope of the law — which is what Guantanamo is all about — what is to stop the powers that be in Washington one day deciding to do the same to those of its citizens it despises for other reasons?
That, the Bush administration may say, is hypothetical. What is not hypothetical is the international damage to US credibility by Guantanamo.
At its worst, it robs it of any moral high ground post 9/11 and in the fight against terrorism. The opposite is being achieved. It convinces America’s enemies that it, not they, is the vicious brute — and therefore all the more reason to strike out against it. It is a complete PR disaster.
Yet in the face of the obvious, Washington ignores the damage, clinging instead to the fallacy that the only thing wrong with Guantanamo is the occasional excesses of individual interrogators and guards. It fails to understand that a prison regime based on the denial of justice will constantly go wrong. The abuse stories are not going to stop. The act cannot be cleaned up. It will have to go.
Sooner rather than later, American public opinion will demand an end to this aberration.
