Liberation

by Katherine

(first of a series)

I have been doing a research project which involved skimming through thousands of pages of transcripts from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals ("CSRTs") that the U.S. military holds for prisoners in Guantanamo. One thing I’ve been struck by is the number of prisoners who allege that they were previously imprisoned, tortured, or had family members killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan or (in a few cases) Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.

This should not have actually been all that surprising. I knew we had picked up and were still holding a number of ordinary Afghans along with actual Taliban and al Qaeda members, and of course I knew that the Taliban did awful things to a lot of people in Afghanistan. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t put these two things together until I started reading through the transcripts. I’ve compiled some of the excerpts from these prisoners’ hearings, which I’m going to post in a short series.

This is not exhaustive, since I only started taking notes on these cases about halfway through, but I'm going to err on the side of including cases. I thought these were stories worth telling. Obviously, I can’t be certain of their accuracy. I found most of them quite credible, and in some cases there's multiple sources telling the same story, but you'll have to judge for yourself.

If you're okay with whatever the United States does to prisoners as long as you can tell yourself, "hey, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were worse," you may find these descriptions reassuring (I would hope they’d at least make people think twice about "Club Gitmo" bumper stickers, but of course the people who buy those bumper stickers would not read this site or a CSRT transcript in a million years). These detainees are in an excellent position to compare the prisons of the United States and its enemies, and they definitely prefer ours.

Needless to say, I don't find that very reassuring. I don't think that's the proper standard of judgment, and God knows President Bush doesn't go around justifying his foreign policy by arguing that "our prisons aren't quite as bad as the Taliban's or Saddam Hussein's." He says things like this:

In this young century, the doubters are still with us. But so is the unstoppable power of freedom. In Afghanistan and Iraq and other nations, that power is replacing tyranny with hope and no one should bet against it.

One of the greatest forces for freedom in the history of the world is the United States armed forces. In the past four and a half years, our troops have liberated more people than at any time since World War II. Because of the men and women who wear our nation's uniform, 50 million people in Iraq and Afghanistan have tasted freedom and their liberation has inspired millions more across the broader Middle East to believe that freedom is theirs as well.

This is going to be freedom's century.

There are a handful of men sitting in cells in Cuba tonight for whom those words, if they could hear or understand them, would sound like a cruel joke.

(sorry, there's not actually any continued text--it's going in a subsequent post instead, and I don't know how to tell typepad that.)

Comments

[Katherine]

If anyone's reading--I had a bunch of follow ups to this planned, but the Department of Defense just released over 2000 more pages of documents today. Oy veh.

So this is going to be a slow series.

[hilzoy]

I'm reading. And grateful to you for writing it.

[Gary Farber]

"And grateful to you for writing it."

So say we all. But possibly it's past time for Katherine to take back the ability to post under her own name again?

Just a suggestion, of course. If she prefers to think of herself as still having Quit Blogging, who am I to quibble?

:-) (We all need our useful fictions; most of us, anyway.)

One other suggestion, which might be worth ignoring, of course: since inevitably someone not sympathetic to your arguments, Katherine, will point out that statements by prisoners -- or, indeed, any human being -- can't simply be accepted automatically as gospel, uttered without bias or free from suspicion of not being the whole truth and nothing butthe truth, that it might be a good idea to pre-emptively acknowledge the point in the first place in your posts, and simply go on to give what you think are good reasons why various claims seem to you nonetheless credible.

Without acknowledging the point pre-emptively, you leave yourself open to the charge that you're simply presenting these statements as The Truth, are being credulous, and so on; I generally find it it's useful to get an inevitable argument out of the way before I have to make it in an inevitable reply in a debate, myself. But, like I said: just a suggestion.

[liberal japonicus]

Katherine,
the offer of a wiki is still open if you want to keep your notes there.

[Katherine]

There's this, no?

"Obviously, I can’t be certain of their accuracy. I found most of them quite credible, and in some cases there's multiple sources telling the same story, but you'll have to judge for yourself."

I realize that's pretty cursory but it seemed easier to talk about specific cases in individual posts. The ARBs'll also help, once I get to them--someone who tells a consistent story at hearings years apart has more credibility--but it's going to take a while. (They are actually in order though, which helps an awful lot.)

yes it makes sense to have my own passwd, we just haven't got around to it.