Sunday, June 19, 2005
(3:56 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Serious Discussion of Guantanamo
David Kopel, apparently incapable of distinguishing metaphors used for rhetorical effect and rigorous historical arguments, offers an appropriate historical analogy to Guantanamo Bay:The more plausible analogy to Guantanamo is British interrogation of Irish Republican Army suspects in the early 1970s. Then, the British extracted confessions through "the five techniques": wall-standing, hooding, continuous noise, deprivation of food, and deprivation of sleep. The European Court of Human Rights, in the 1978 case Republic of Ireland v. United Kingdom, ruled that the techniques did not constitute "torture," but were "inhuman and degrading," in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.No. Did that case include things like being chained hand-and-foot to the floor so that the people being interrogated shat and pissed on themselves? No. Did it include sexual humiliation? No. Did it include forced grooming? No. There are a million (oh! sorry! a more plausible number would be "dozens of") things that are going on at Guantanamo that did not go on in the situation mentioned that make Guantanamo a considerably more serious situation than that described. Insofar as using attention-getting rhetoric comparing the vicious and inhumane treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other "fronts" on the so-called "War on Terror" to some of the worst atrocities committed by the sworn enemies of the United States is some kind of problem -- and I don't think it is, I think that it's morally bankrupt to spend one's time denouncing such rhetoric when the decent human thing to do is to denounce what our government is doing in our name! -- the solution is not to pick a "more plausible analogy" that just happens to "normalize" the treatment there, then declare that "serious." Apparently the only discussion of Guantanamo that counts as "serious" is that which "recognizes" the "necessary evil" of continuing to run our little prison camp. Well, I say: no. In fact, here are some theses:
- If you have devoted considerable space to explaining away every "allegation" of "misconduct" in American interogation techniques, then you lack the moral judgment of an eight-year-old child.
- If you advocate any position that doesn't include unilaterally shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and returning everyone there to their home countries, then you are not serious. You are not worth talking to or arguing with on this point, because you are unequivocally, completely wrong.
- Insistence that one turn a blind eye to the abuses of one's own government in order to denounce the abuses of others, separated by wide expanses of time and space from oneself, is an affront to the principle of democratic self-governance. If anything should count as "un-American," such rhetoric should -- it denegrates the legitimate right and privilege of the people of the United States to exercise the principle of democratic self-governance, in favor of giving those in power a free hand to do whatever they want. Such servile authoritarian rhetoric, of which we get reams and reams spewed forth from the unoffical Republican Party organs represented by Fox News, the right-wing press, and bloggers such as Glen Reynolds, is absolutely contrary to the principles on which this country was founded and should be denounced, execrated, and shouted down by all those who take seriously their responsibilities as citizens in a democratic polity and as rational human agents.
If your first reaction to this is to accuse me of overlooking the fact that the Democrats are just as bad if not worse, then I think you have some serious soul-searching to do.
