Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Not since the Nixon years has there been such an assault on civil liberties as today, in the Age of Ashcroft. Back then, the White House, not satisfied with the considerable cooperation it was getting from the FBI and CIA, created its own rogue group, the so-called plumbers. And the same eager-beaver spirit trickled down, too. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration provided local cops with money to buy such crucial police tools as armored personnel carriers. The LEAA was eventually laughed out of existence, but now it's back, pork-barreling away, in the guise of the infinitely larger and more permanent Department of Heimat -- oops, make that Homeland -- Security.
Another fond ambition of authoritarians through the ages is to cause enemies, and perceived enemies, to disappear. In the early '70s, one of Richard Nixon's hatchet men -- perhaps the great Charles Colson himself, in his pre-born-again mode -- might have labored over his copy of the "enemies list," dreaming of putting, say, newsman Daniel Schorr into a cell on some American Devil's Island. But back then, it never happened here.
Yet today, it is indeed happening here -- just 100 miles off our Florida shore. In the wake of the Afghanistan operation, the United States established a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to hold "enemy combatants." That was a new category intended, by legal design, to circumvent the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. Of all the unilateral decisions taken by the Bush administration, this flouting of the law was perhaps the most breathtaking. That is, a few government lawyers sat down and dreamed up a category that would enable Uncle Sam, so they hoped, to skirt 150 years of evolving international law.
To be sure, few Americans seem to care about the fate of the some 600 individuals still held at Guantánamo Bay. Moreover, it's quite possible that many of the prisoners, perhaps most, are fighters, some with American blood on their hands. Yet even so, Americans might at least heed the pragmatic argument for good treatment of the detainees; the Guantánamo setup has done immeasurable harm to our international image, not to mention the potential harm to future American POWs.
These issues become clear in "Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom," a stage production first performed in London and now playing in New York's Greenwich Village. Co-creators Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo derived their script entirely from the letters and testimony of those incarcerated at the U.S. base in Cuba, as well as from the verbatim words of their families, lawyers and captors.
As a piece of theater, "Guantánamo" can't quite escape its agitprop roots. But to the extent that its message is true -- that the U.S. government has gone to great lengths to establish a Kafka-esque penal colony -- the production only reinforces the findings of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press about the depth of anti-Americanism around the world. Such sentiments make it all the more difficult for America to gain support for its policies, as well as for pro-American candidates to win free elections -- if such elections are, in fact, held -- in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as the play emphasizes, Guantánamo is just one island in an ugly archipelago of penal colonies, reaching from "Gitmo" to Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Bagram in Afghanistan to an unknown number of sites in non-Marquess of Queensbury countries such as Egypt.
Still, most Americans probably don't care. The United States has "moral clarity," the administration assures us, and if the rest of the world is too blind to see the coming of "liberty century," well, then, too bad -- Uncle Sam will just have to go it alone. So even if the intelligence from Guantánamo Bay is, as the Observer reports, "hopelessly flawed" by a combination of carelessness in taking captives and zealousness in abusing those captives, it probably makes no difference in the court of American public opinion. After all, as the ninja cops in black strutting through Arlington on their way to save the subway remind us, much of the fun of "fighting terror" is dressing for the part and going through the motions. After that manly ritualizing, effectiveness is an afterthought.
So we come to the most powerful point of "Guantánamo": If it can happen at Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta, it can happen here. In the words of Gareth Peirce, a British solicitor representing one of the inmates, Guantánamo is a transferable tool of "social control." That is, once created, it can be replicated.
Think I'm exaggerating? Then consider, as a straw in the zeitgeist, Michelle Malkin's new book, "In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror." Malkin, increasingly styling herself as the raven-haired answer to Ann Coulter, has written a book defending not only profiling but also rounding up people by race, without due process -- or any process -- for indefinite confinement. It wasn't that long ago that President Reagan agreed that Japanese-Americans had been done a grave injustice during World War II; in 1988, he signed a law awarding compensation to those victims. And in 2000, a permanent memorial to these Japanese-Americans was dedicated on Capitol Hill. But now, just a few years later, the wheel is turning, back to a dark time of involuntary mass movements to remote camps.
Anti-liberty lightning struck America once, and it might soon strike again.
So "Guantánamo" stands as sentinel, reminding any who might care that our freedoms are at risk. The play, backstopped by the scrappy-lefty Center for Constitutional Rights, is at least a sprig of hope poking through the heavy slate of discipline and control.
In the play, Lord Johan Steyn adds a poetic flourish, recalling the 17th century meditation of John Donne: We all must be "involved in mankind" because the loss of any of us diminishes all of us. And so, Steyn concludes, "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." Those wonderful but oft-invoked words have become a cliché, but in these times, they are exactly the call to conscience that Donne intended.
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