A Gulag For Our Times

[dvandom]

Okay, I'm behind the curve on this one, it's something I just didn't get around to blogging on right away.

On the one side, you have Amnesty International calling Camp X-Ray "The Gulag of our times" or words to that effect. On the other, you have hordes of people angrily mocking AI for comparing the horrors of the Gulag to the relatively mild imprisonment of X-Ray. Meanwhile, the government takes the accusations seriously enough to bend over backwards showing how nicely the detainees are being treated.

To me, this is a classic case of people arguing at utterly different levels. The people mocking AI are looking purely at surface features. The government is trying to direct people's attention to the surface features. And on the surface level, X-Ray is MUCH nicer than a gulag. Several orders of magnitude nicer.

But that is not the point. On an "underlying meaning" level, Camp X-Ray may not be THE gulag for our times, but it's certainly A gulag.

At its core, the purpose of the gulag is not directly to torment someone. The purpose of a gulag is to remove enemies of the state from direct contact with anyone else, strip them of their rights, and leave them no real way to remedy this situation. Once you have them in the gulag, then you can do whatever else you want to do to them, freely. Stalin made sure the victims suffered, the US Government is playing nice.

But make no mistake: the detainees at X-Ray have no real rights. They are not citizens, so lack those rights. They are not prisoners of war, so they lack those rights. They are not prisoners of the civil system, so they lack those rights. They are only entitled to such treatment as the government decides to give them, with no LEGAL recourse. They have recourse in the court of public opinion, but with the Bush Administration being so bulletproof, it doesn't get them a whole lot.

(Aside: legally, the Geneva Convention doesn't apply. It's one of those conventions that only applies to signatories among each other. Signing onto the Geneva Convention doesn't require you follow its rules all the time, only in dealing with citizens of other nations who have signed on. Again, public opinion is the only real reason a nation has to follow it when not in a declared war with a signatory nation.)

So, yes...Camp X-Ray is a gulag in the important ways. The fact that its inhabitants aren't being mistreated is irrelevant, as they have no rights. At all. That we are merciful does not change that they are at our mercy.


We now return to being silly and irrelevant.

Comments

[zamiel.livejournal.com]

The idealistic cynic in me would like to point out there are much more "traditional" gulags in play today than Gitmo. The bulk of North Korea's dissident storage (I can't in good faith really call them prisons, actually). China's prison system. Hell, even AI's own reports on specifically French criminal detention were all far more likely to leave documented trails of thousands-plus in their wakes.

But, of course, none of those matter, because we don't expect better from them, do we? The North Koreans are Little Yellow People(tm) and don't really count as human, right? We can't expect them or the Chinese to acknowledge Right and Wrong. And the French? Whatever they do its sophisticated. Clearly we just don't "get" their hip Euro sensibilities.

Is Gitmo really a gulag? By strict denotation, in the strictu sensu, yes. In denotation? Maybe we should ask some of the folks who survived the real gulags in Siberia if they'd have liked their rice pilaf microwaved before they chose to throw it at their guards? Possibly if they might have wanted to trade working in the tundra shoeless with a pick on frozen ground for the sunny Cuban outdoors with Christina Aguillera music?

Referring to Gitmo as a gulag is insulting to those who've survived the terrors of a real oppressive government, and who sacrificed a lot more than life should have required to come out breathing.

The truth is the detainees at Gitmo have no right to be alive. Captured on the battlefield or in the hot zone in the course of hostile action against American soldiers operating in accordance with Geneva requirements, un-uniformed, from within civilian populations ... By the rules of war, we were well within our rights to put bullets in their heads 3sec after capture. They had no legal, or frankly, moral, right to more.

There's still time for that solution, of course.

[not-croaker.livejournal.com]

Furthermore, a good few hundred have been released from X-Ray and repatriated to their nation of origin.

99% of them turned up shooting at American troops again within 30 days of release.

This is why countries imprison Prisoners of War: To keep them from going out and killing more of their troops and civilians.

This is why the inmates of Camp X-Ray will not be released, provided legal counsel, or otherwise committed to the criminal justice system.

Do we treat them poorly? Compared to a free citizen on the street, going about his/her business and not shooting other people at random, yes, we do. Compared to the average inmate of a maximum-security prison, where we'd send anyone caught on US soil doing the kinds of things these people did (if only as a prelude to their execution while we waited through the appeals process)? Hell no. Look at conditions in any American max-sec prison and compare it to Gitmo, and you'll have perps asking to be transferred to military custody by the thousands.