[Peace-discuss] The American gulag

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I may have to eat my words from a post yesterday.  Here's a
quintessential Good Liberal, a DLC Democrat apparatchik, making an
argument that few of his sort have made so clearly.  Of course he's saying
it to condemn this administration in contrast with his own (he worked for
Clinton), but in Kissinger's phrase, "It has the extra, added attraction
of being true."  --CGE]

	This is the new gulag
	Bush has created a global network of extra-legal 
	and secret US prisons with thousands of inmates
	Sidney Blumenthal
	Thursday May 6, 2004
	The Guardian

It was "unacceptable" and "un-American", but was it torture? "My
impression is that what has been charged thus far is abuse, which I
believe technically is different from torture," said Donald Rumsfeld, the
secretary of defence on Tuesday. "I don't know if it is correct to say
what you just said, that torture has taken place, or that there's been a
conviction for torture. And therefore I'm not going to address the torture
word."

He confessed he had still not read the March 9 report by Major General
Antonio Taguba on "abuse" at the Abu Ghraib prison. Some highlights: " ...
pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom
handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape ... sodomising a
detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick ... "

The same day that Rumsfeld added his contribution to the history of
Orwellian statements by high officials, the Senate armed services
committee was briefed behind closed doors for the first time not only
about Abu Ghraib, but about military and CIA prisons in Afghanistan. It
learned of the deaths of 25 prisoners and two murders in Iraq; that
private contractors were at the centre of these lethal incidents; and that
no one had been charged. The senators were given no details about the
private contractors. They might as well have been fitted with hoods.

Many of them, Democratic and Republican, were infuriated that there was no
accountability and no punishment and demanded a special investigation, but
the Republican leadership quashed it. The senators want Rumsfeld to
testify in a public hearing, but he is resisting and the Republican
leaders are blocking it.

The Bush administration was well aware of the Taguba report, but more
concerned about its exposure than its contents. General Richard Myers, the
chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, was dispatched on a mission to CBS
news to tell it to suppress its story and the horrifying pictures. For two
weeks, CBS's 60 Minutes II show complied, until it became known that the
New Yorker magazine would publish excerpts of the report. Myers was then
sent on to the Sunday morning news programmes to explain, but under
questioning acknowledged that he had still not read the report he had
tried to censor from the public for weeks.

President Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials, unable to contain
the controversy any longer, engaged in profuse apologies and scheduled
appearances on Arab television. There were still no firings. One of their
chief talking points was that the "abuse" was an aberration. But Abu
Ghraib was a predictable consequence of the Bush administration
imperatives and policies.

Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from prisons in
Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guantánamo to secret CIA prisons around the
world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in
Afghanistan and almost 700 in Guantánamo, but no one knows the exact
numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems
necessary. There has been nothing like this system since the fall of the
Soviet Union. The US military embraced the Geneva conventions after the
second world war, because applying them to prisoners of war protects
American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight,
trumped its argument by designating those at Guantánamo "enemy
combatants". Rumsfeld extended this system - "a legal black hole",
according to Human Rights Watch - to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly
rejecting the conventions.

Private contractors, according to the Toguba report, gave orders to US
soldiers to torture prisoners. Their presence in Iraq is a result of the
Bush military strategy of invading with a relatively light force. The gap
has been filled by private contractors, who are not subject to Iraqi law
or the US military code of justice. Now, there are an estimated 20,000 of
them on the ground in Iraq, a larger force than the British army.

It is not surprising that recent events in Iraq centre on these
contractors: the four killed in Falluja, and Abu Ghraib's interrogators.
Under the Bush legal doctrine, we create a system beyond law to defend the
rule of law against terrorism; we defend democracy by inhibiting
democracy. Law is there to constrain "evildoers". Who doubts our love of
freedom?

But the arrogance of virtuous certainty masks the egotism of power. It is
the opposite of American pragmatism, which always under stands that
knowledge is contingent, tentative and imperfect. This is a conflict in
the American mind between two claims on democracy, one with a sense of
paradox, limits and debate, the other purporting to be omniscient, even
messianic, requiring no checks because of its purity, and contemptuous of
accountability.

"This is the only one where they took pictures," Tom Malinowski,
Washington advocate of Human Rights Watch, and a former staff member of
the National Security Council, told me. "This was not considered a
debatable topic until people had to stare at the pictures."

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and
Washington bureau chief of Salon.com

Sidney_Blumenthal at yahoo.com

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004