"Detainees"

While listening to the news the other day I came to a bizarre realization. Generally I pride myself on following politics pretty regularly and at least most of the time being able to look through a story to whether it’s completely fabricated, somewhat blown up/down or actual fact. Now the story that particularly threw me off was one about Guantanamo Bay. I was sort of half listening/half doing work and it hit me that for the last few years there has been this vague realization in the back of my mind that we have what are essentially prison camps in Cuba. Not just that, but the particular circumstances of the camps, which I will get into, made me think “why has this been only in the back of my mind”.

The Guantanamo Bay prison camp is home to a good chunk of the tens of thousands of “detainees” currently held by US and coalition forces. How the detainees got to the camp is questionable. For sure, at least some of the “detainees” were captured during skirmishes with U.S. forces, and others in raids of known locations of U.S. occupation resistance forces. Regardless of your views on the war (personally I think that the war itself is an epic tragedy born from monumental lies to the American people and the world as part of a neo-con agenda for world domination by force), the “detainees” who were captured while forcibly resisting US occupation are arguably legitimate “prisoners of war,” however that is not the entirety of the matter. A huge chunk of the detainees who are at Guantanamo Bay and our other illustrious gulag resorts are not legitimate prisoners, but in fact people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now if the military wants to use the excuse that they just don’t know for sure over there who is who and that sometimes people slip though the cracks, that’s one thing, but if that’s the case then there needs to be a faster processing time on these “detainees.” Many prisoners have been there for three years now without trial, rights, a clue of what they’re being “charged” with, or if they’re even being charged at all. Tens of thousands of people are being stripped of years of their life in pseudo concentration camps which are known to engage in acts of torture and abuse. We all saw the pictures and then the government went “It’ll never happen again”, but if you listen to the voices of the mostly silenced few who have been lucky enough to get released from “Hotel Oppression” the party is still going strong behind closed doors.

The main argument that I hear from the other side and from our own government is that the Iraqi citizens in prison camps are terrorists who hate America and freedom and because of what they did do not deserve their rights as people. This makes me want to hit things. First of all, no Iraqis killed any Americans until we invaded their country unjustly and all of the terrible things that the Iraqi government did to its people and its neighbors in the recent past have been supported completely by our government. Also Iraq had no involvement in the 2001 attacks. Secondly, an issue that the US government has failed to make obvious is that the means by which we get our “detainees” leaves a lot of headroom for some if not most of the detained citizens to be as innocent as you or me. A system that has been a main source of detainees has been that we allow local thugs and crime lords, who the American government has cooperated with from the very beginning (they have a lot in common), to bring in people who they suspect of being involved in resistance for monetary compensation. This means that the Iraqi crime lords can basically sell anyone they want (as long as they’re Muslim and fit the description) to American forces for a hefty bounty. As you can imagine this leads to many false imprisonments in the name of greed. The other factor to consider is that US forces will raid and arrest anyone in a home or place of business who they have been tipped off to by local citizens. This causes a rather outrageous situation in which a greedy neighbor living next to a wealthy upstanding Iraqi tells US forces that his rich neighbor is a participant in the resistance and therefore have his rich neighbor shipped to US “detainee” camps where he or she will not be charged or tried or processed but instead will rot in a cell along with his family while the greedy neighbor takes his house and all of his worldly possessions. The situation is exacerbated because the already shaky infrastructure in the country is completely shot due to our presence and the greedy neighbor in his new home is not bothered by Iraqi law enforcement that have much more important things to worry about than squatters.

My point is, the biggest infraction of human rights in a non third world country since the concentration camps of Nazi Germany is going on right now and we’re the ones perpetrating it. History will look back on this differently than we’re looking at it right now. Media and government and everything thrown at us by corporate America urges us to look away and go about our daily lives working and eating and being ants, but stop and think about how you look at Germans who were living in Germany who did not protest or at least try to say it was wrong what was going on then. I’m not trying to compare the US to Nazi Germany; instead I’m asking how you’d like to be remembered. Would you like to go down in history as a citizen of a country that did terrible things and yet you did nothing, or would you like to have at least tried to get your voice heard and write a resounding “NO” to these actions into the pages of the next generation’s history books?

Posted by Cliff Casey on June 08, 2005 at 11:12 am EST

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