OPINION> Commentary
Occupations abroad lead to erosion of liberties
By Gary Younge (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-25 07:20

A script, which has long been clear, has been written at Guantanamo Bay. The point of these detentions has never been to see justice done, but rather to provide a teachable moment about the lengths and depths the American state would go to pursue its perceived interests in the war on terror.

It was to find a place in which the US could operate above and beyond not only international law but its own - a display of unfettered power not merely indifferent to, but openly contemptuous of, global and local norms.

It is a brutal allegory in which Guantanamo is not the exception but the rule: a grotesque exemplar of the Bush administration's reflexive and opportunistic response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, from the bombing of Iraq to the phone-tapping of its own citizens.

Like Abu Ghraib and the "black sites" of rendition, the violations that have taken place there are systemic and systematic. Like the broader war on terror, they have been characterized by criminality and ineptitude. The camp has not hosted a single trial, and only 19 of the remaining 270 detainees have been charged.

"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error that hints at active complicity," wrote Simone de Beauvoir, referring to French atrocities in Algeria. "There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."

Detain, bomb, invade, torture and spy now - ask questions later. Such have been the impulses of the Bush years. But "now" inherits a past and bequeaths a legacy. "Later" keeps arriving with answers for which a largely quiescent if not compliant American public appears to have little stomach. A power grab for the state; a black hole for legality; a free rein for the military; a vacuum for democracy.

And like so much else in these twilight months of this administration, the warped logic that underpins Guantanamo is unraveling at great pace. The recent supreme court ruling that inmates have the same rights to habeas corpus protection as "enemy combatants" held on US soil has shed its final fig leaf.

Meanwhile, last week's congressional testimony and the dissenting voices of some of the inmate's military lawyers bear witness to how low the administration has stooped and how high the decision-making has gone.

"The laws and constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the supreme court majority. Maybe so. But political cultures are not. They are feathers for every wind that blows, vulnerable to demagogue and democrat alike.

"To hold that the political branches may switch the constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, 'say what the law is'," Kennedy continued. But that is precisely what has been happening these past seven years.

Documents released by congressional investigators last week show interrogators have not so much pushed the envelope, as shredded and torched it.

Mark Fallon, the deputy commander of the defense department's criminal investigation taskforce, warned Pentagon colleagues in an e-mail in October 2002 that the interrogation techniques they were discussing, and later implemented, would "shock the conscience of any legal body". "This looks like the kind of stuff congressional hearings are made of," he said. "Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this."

In the same month Jonathan Friedman, a CIA counter-terrorism lawyer, told military and intelligence officials that "torture is basically subject to perception". "If the detainee dies," continued Friedman, "you are doing it wrong."

Throughout, innocence, guilt, facts and evidence have been little more than technicalities. Indeed, the enterprise has been a huge faith-based initiative - guided by the notion that if you believe you are doing the right thing, it doesn't matter what you actually do.

Colonel Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, recalled a meeting he had with Pentagon general counsel William Haynes, who oversees Guantanamo's tribunal process, about the forthcoming trials of the detainees. "[Haynes] said these trials will be the Nuremberg of our time," said Davis. Davis then pointed out that the handful of acquittals at Nuremberg had given the proceedings a sense of legitimacy and credibility that across-the-board convictions never would have.

"I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process," Davis told the Nation. "At which point, [Haynes's] eyes got wide and he said, 'Wait a minute, we cannot have acquittals. If we've been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We cannot have acquittals. We've got to have convictions."

Over the past four years at least five military prosecutors have resigned from their jobs or from their cases at Guantanamo because they felt their integrity would otherwise be compromised, citing tainted evidence obtained under torture and political interference.

However, there is nothing uniquely American about any of this. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's bid for 42-day detention without charge fits the mould perfectly.

Occupations abroad ineluctably dovetail with the erosion of liberties at home. The only difference seems to be that, on paper at least, the US has set itself higher standards - a fact that exhausts its one truly renewable resource: innocence. "How on earth did we get to the point where a US government lawyer would say that ... torture is subject to perception?" asked Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, last week. How indeed?

As one inmate warned: "Every individual American should realize that what happened to me could happen to anybody."

The Guardian

(China Daily 06/25/2008 page9)