The story is told in a Christian Science Monitor report on Kurnaz's testimony to Congress on Tuesday this week.
This is bad enough, even without the allegations of abuse and torture (see the Washington Post review of Kurnaz's book).
What depresses me almost as much is the lack of "mainstream" news coverage in the US - unlike in Europe, where Kurnaz is apparently a household name. The Kurnaz testimony was on the front-page of the Monitor, but was not reported by (say) NPR, the New York Times, or the Washington Post.
The only silver lining is that Congress is attending to this matter. Even a stalwart Republican and defender of the Guantánamo prison system is reported to have conceded during the hearing that mistakes were made in this case. Regret is no substitute for avoiding shameful behavior in the first place, but it's better than nothing.
Better than regret would be action:
- The United States should compensate those it has detained without reasonable cause at Guantanamo and elsewhere. If they end up using the money to attack the US, too bad; this is about our self-respect and morality as a nation, not a calculus of martial efficiency.
- The Congress should make it clear through legislation that the US rule of law applies to anybody held by any agent of the US government anywhere, regardless of legal niceties like "Guantanamo is not US soil, so the law does not apply," or "the Pakistanis did it, not us."
- The Congress should promulgate clear and uniform rules on interrogation techniques which apply to all agents of the United States; no exemptions for the CIA, special forces, military intelligence etc.
1 comment:
Interesting blog!
Of the few pages I looked at, I'm the only one to comment. It takes either immense hubris to keep a blog going for as long as you have, or extraordinary dedication and humility, especially when it would seem no one's paying enough attention to comment; I'll try and give you the benefit of the doubt :)
While I don't agree with everything you've written (again, in the few pages that I saw), it seems thoughtful and well-reasoned, at least until we come to this: "The United States should compensate those it has detained without reasonable cause at Guantanamo and elsewhere. If they end up using the money to attack the US, too bad; this is about our self-respect and morality as a nation, not a calculus of martial efficiency."
If we have detained someone without "reasonable cause", then yes, we should likely compensate them. But to then go on and say "if they then use the money to attack us, too bad" -- this would belie any idea that they were detained without cause, no? Innocent victims swept up in an anti-terror round-up in a dusty town in Afghanistan are not, upon being released and compensated what would be more money than his entire clan has ever dreamed of, going to go enlist in jihadi school. While some make the argument that American heavy-handedness CREATES terrorists, I'm not sure this is borne out by the facts, or logic. So someone who takes his comp money and funnels it into jihad is, I believe, someone who was doing this already when picked up.
Furthermore, in the debate about civil liberties versus security, it's always been a weakness of the "civil liberties" side to say, if we get attacked, too bad -- because the statistical likelihood of it being the speaker or his/her loved ones who are actually attacked is very, very small. Easy enough to say, "freedom even though it may mean someone is hurt by it" when that someone is someone else. Would you be willing to offer up yourself, or YOUR loved ones to be the victims? Of course not.
This all is not to argue for a restrictive society where civil rights and liberty are not respected; rather it's to point out one of the necessary weaknesses of the other side of the argument, which you seem to fall into, and which needs to be persuasively answered to further its cause.
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