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CounterPunch
November
6, 2002
Hypocrisy at
Camp Delta
by PIERRE TRISTAM
We don't hear much about the prisoners of Guantanamo
Bay anymore, those men harvested from the terror farms of Afghanistan
and shucked of all legal bearings down to the word "alleged."
When we do, it's in snippets of absurdities, like fugitive scenes
from something Samuel Beckett might have written a sequel to
"Waiting for Godot" where Godot has been knocked off
for good and Vladimir and Estragon are babbling centenarians
wondering, like those two ancient Afghans released from Guantanamo
last week, what they could possibly have been doing on a palm-horned
Devil's Island in the first place.
Here was Vladimir, a.k.a. Faiz Muhammad,
a partially deaf, shriveled relic who said he was 105 years
old, boasting about his new clothes like a first grader on his
first day of school. And here was Estragon, <a.k.a>. Muhammad
Siddiq, a 90-year-old whose beard should be an archeological
dig and whose cane was probably mistaken for a howitzer by his
wise American captors. Those, then, are the kind of men on
Guantanamo branded "uniquely dangerous" by John Ashcroft,
that uniquely dangerous general with an attorney lost somewhere
in his official title.
We don't hear much about Guantanamo anymore
because it has become too exact a symbol of America's tit-for-Taliban
lawlessness, of the ease with which the Bush junta has buried
all pretenses of following the very conventions the United States
did so much to establish in the last century, the very justice
it pretends to be defending in its so-called war on terrorism.
So far it has been a war of press conference victories and collateral
damage, most of it in America and its colonies. Guantanamo may
be an off-shore extreme of the damage. But it is only materially
different from the abuses that are taking place on the mainland
since the passage of the USA Patriot Act, last year's winner
of the Orwell Award for misnomers the jailing of legal residents
without charge, the re-legalization of domestic spying on Americans,
the standardization of government secrecy, the militarization
of civilian defense, the return, like 1950s-style crew cuts
and gas guzzlers, of un-American activities.
Judging from a report by Joseph Lelyveld,
the former executive editor of The New York Times, in the current
issue of the New York Review of Books, journalists who travel
to Guantanamo to see the 600-odd prisoners of Camp Delta aren't
allowed to see much of anything but scenes from that Beckett
sequel. The closest they get to prisoners is a "media
observation point" behind barbed wire, 200 yards away from
the nearest shipping container within which five 6.8 x 8 feet
cells have been sectioned off for individual prisoners. They're
told of the Korans left in each cell like Gideon bibles. They
witness a recorded call to prayer on the camp's PA system. They
might hear a prisoner's chant. They speak with the military
reservists serving there as guards, like the actor from Queens
who's also the life beneath the mascot of the New York Mets,
the guy who runs a martial arts academy, also in Queens, or
one of the commanding officers of Camp Delta, who's actually
the director of a veterans' cemetery in Rhode Island. All such
normal folk lending normality to a sham.
The journalists leave no better informed
about the prisoners than when they'd arrived. But the purpose
of the visit is not to inform. It is to shape a perception,
to send journalists home with the quite accurate notion that
Camp Delta is a humane place where every guard attends "cultural
awareness" classes, where inmates are well fed, well clothed,
and never interrogated for more than 24 hours at a time. Enough
to make journalists forget that the whole thing is an illegal
scheme where a mass of low-level foot-soldiers are shackled
in hopes, still unfulfilled after almost a year, that some of
them turn out to be the real deal. But whether or not they're
fed caviar and Koranic chants five times a day doesn't change
the fact that they're in indefinite preventive detention the
sort of detention the United States once denounced as criminal
back when the specialty was more Siberian than tropical.
As surely as good sense might concede
that it holds men who fit the definition of terrorists, Guantanamo
is just as surely a concentration camp where law is held in
contempt and self-justifying legalistic inventions smell of
Stalinist-style thuggery. There is no such thing as "unlawful
enemy combatants," as the administration has branded the
Guantanamo captives to put them out of all legal bounds. The
words are themselves an invention outside the bounds of all
laws and conventions, a set of words that have no more legitimate
weight than if they'd been concocted by a White House intern,
which they very well may have been. Yet the words have been
swallowed whole even by most of the news media, which betray
their complicit adherence to the administration's storyline,
when referring to the prisoners of Guantanamo, by avoiding all
such encumbrances as "alleged," "suspected,"
"accused." When the shapers of public opinion willingly
let their sense of fairness be held captive, you cannot entirely
blame the Bush junta's autocratic instinct for running free
on Guantanamo, on the mainland, or across the empire. The administration
is lawless because the media, the public, the courts and of
course Congress, that eunuch-in-chief, are playing along.
The concentration camp on Guantanamo
should be an indictment of national drift from constitutional
principles and international law. It is instead no more than
"shadows on the wall of silence," as Lelyveld described
the silhouettes he barely detected inside a Camp Delta brig.
If the national conscience is willing to ignore the shame of
Guantanamo, it'll ignore anything, as it very well has. Give
it a listen. When it isn't drowned out by the Pledge of Allegiance
or Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American," you
can hear that wall of silence all over the country.
Pierre Tristam
can be reached at ptristam@att.net.
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