Unlike the earlier suicides at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp, this time the US military has not tried to insult international intelligence by claiming that the latest suicide — of yet another Saudi — was a public relations exercise designed to embarrass the US.
Nonetheless, the death of Abdul Rahman Al-Amri puts the detention facility firmly back in the dock. Which is where it should be until there are explanations and answers that the world can believe. The entire Guantanamo Bay facility is an insult to humanity, to all ideas of human rights and to the most basic ideas related to the humane treatment of our fellow men.
Relying on the usual schoolyard bully tactics — might makes right — and oblivious to all protests, the US has been holding many people there for a long time. A large number of them are in the facility simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Torture, solitary confinement, humiliation, the desecration of Muslim religious books: These are the tools used in Guantanamo against the detainees most of whom have no idea why they are there. Behaving like the worst cowboys of the 19th century, the Americans went to the Afghan/Pakistani border and began waving dollars as they asked the area tribals to point out members of the Taleban. Eager to fill their pockets with dollars, the people began pointing at anyone.
In fact, one unfortunate detainee ended up in Guantanamo because his rival for a woman’s affections wanted to get rid of him. The Americans were told he was a Taleban sympathizer and so he was immediately and unquestioningly detained. His brother, a journalist in Peshawar, wailed, “My brother starts his day with a glass of whisky. He has no religious affiliation and now he is being tortured.”
Guantanamo is America’s greatest shame. It contradicts every principle the country’s founders believed in, fought for and wrote into the Constitution. The other great American document, the Declaration of Independence in which the 13 original colonies declared themselves no longer under British rule, ends with the signatories pledging to one another, “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Lives and fortunes are of course transitory but honor is not; for 200 years, American honor meant a great deal, both in the US and abroad. It was a beacon of hope to many. That beacon no longer shines. Virtually nobody, in the US or anywhere else — apart from the Bush administration’s most fervent supporters — has a shred of doubt that Guantanamo is illegal, is an exercise in the most brazen hypocrisy, is both a PR and human rights disaster and should have been closed long ago.
Indeed, it should never have been opened. How can anyone possibly credit the moral integrity of a government that so blatantly ignores its own laws? Simply put, Washington is holding detainees in legal limbo outside the borders of the US because to do so within them would bring the entire weight of American justice down on its head.
Because it does not know what to do with the 380 detainees, the White House trots out the line that they are “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war and, as such, can be held until the war is over. That argument would possibly apply in the classic situation in which states are at war with each other and when, at the end of the fighting, there is a settlement. But the war against terror is not going to end cleanly and neatly with negotiations, treaties and redrawn boundaries. Neither is it going to end in the foreseeable future. Which means, in light of the Bush argument, that the detainees are going to spend forever in their cells and orange suits.
No wonder some see suicide as the only way out. Six years after the invasion of Afghanistan, if the US authorities — whoever they are and whatever qualifications, linguistic and otherwise they possess — have not managed to extract all the information available, it is surely because they are grossly incompetent or there is simply no more information to be extracted. After all, whatever the detainees may have known six years ago is obviously well out of date by now.
The unfortunate detainees should be either sent home for processing or charged with supporting terrorism. In the latter case, if existing US laws are not designed for that purpose, then the White House should move to change them; if Congress does not agree to the changes, then the Republicans will at least have a handy weapon with which to challenge the Democrats in next year’s presidential elections.
The most potent argument for closing Guantanamo is that it does not make the US safe. By bearing witness to President Bush’s willingness to sidestep the law, it fuels hatred, particularly among young alienated Muslims around the world who see in it tangible proof of injustice, discrimination and oppression. And it is of course not only Muslims who say to America, “We have had enough.”
