Goodreads Bookshelf
What do we want?
Last night, I had a hard time getting to sleep. There was sinus pressure, there was a general achy-ness to my body, and there was the fact that I felt too hot under the covers and with the dog pressed up against me. I'd taken Sudafed and it wasn't doing enough good to let me sleep. I tried distracting myself with music, and it had some marginal effectiveness, but not enough. I felt, in a word, miserable.
I thought, then, of others who have it worse than me. How would I sleep after spending twelve hours with my hands and feet bound together while undergoing "harsh interrogation techniques." Or, for that matter, sleeping in the spartan conditions of a cell in Guantanamo Bay, not knowing whether I'll ever see friends and family again. Describing my experience of sinus pain as "miserable" sounds like gross hyperbole all of a sudden.
My school yesterday hosted an alumnus of our school, of Harvard, and of Harvard Law who is a professor of law at American University who has worked with other lawyers on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. He offered a disturbing picture of what our government is doing on our behalf.
Of course, the official line is that Gitmo is for the worst of the worst. Well, his particular client was 15 in 2002 when he was taken to Gitmo. A Canadian citizen whose family had moved to their native Afghanistan, his home was destroyed and the rest of his family killed by a couple of American bombs. He is alleged to have thrown a grenade at and killed an American soldier when they came to mop up after the bombing. The truth of this is unclear, though it would be hard to blame him even if it's true. Regardless, international law makes a clear distinction between adult and minor combatants. The U.S. did eventually acknowledge that the 12- and 13- year-olds they sent to Guantanamo were mistakes, but his client is still there six years later.
Beyond that, at one point in Pakistan, the U.S. government was offering a bounty of $5,000 for "suspected" terrorists. As that's more than most Pakistanis make in a year, how careful do you think folks were in airing their "suspicions"? Now, there very probably are people in Guantanamo who "deserve" to be there, but it seems equally clear that a significant number of people who have been--and still are--there do not. Of course, since they're denied due process, how do we know? They've been classified as "enemy combatants," which the U.S. government interprets to mean that they can be held "until the war is over." Which, as we all know, could be never; we've been told it very probably will last beyond our lifetimes.
Meanwhile, we clearly have been torturing detainees, and Bush has just vetoed a bill that would have prevented the use of water boarding and other coercive interrogation techniques. I tend to be skeptical that very much valuable information is gained from such techniques, and that's especially true when we seem to have been relatively undiscriminating in our selection of who to detain. How many innocent lives is our national security worth? If we even wanted to do this kind of moral math, though, we would need to know how many plots were actually, definitely averted by evidence obtained through torture of these detainees? Really, though, do we want to be the sort of nation that tortures? That goes against the international consensus on human rights? If we give up morality for expediency, is that the kind of nation we want to be? Theoretically, the government of a democracy is supposed to represent the will of the people, but history shows that it rarely does so unless the people force it to do so. We the people need to make our beliefs about torture and indefinite detention crystal clear to our elected officials. It's easy for us to ignore this--as U.S. citizens, we're protected from being sent to Guantanamo Bay or a similar "black site." If we ignore this issue, though, we are complicit: their pain and suffering--and in some cases, deaths--are on our hands, because we did not work to express our outrage and allowed millions of dollars of our tax money to go to the building and operation of these detention facilities.
Your thoughts are, as always, welcome.