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April 9, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

23:05

1324 True News 30 - Gitmo

The view from inside.

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I hope that you're doing well, and thank you so much to those who brought me up short on my comparison between Guantanamo Bay and concentration camps under Nazism.
	I'd like to clarify a few points, if I may, and perhaps I was overreaching in the metaphor, but I think it will be an interesting exercise to look at some of the facts and theories as to why I was saying what I was saying, and then we'll try a little thought experiment to see if it makes any sense.
	Now, first and foremost, the key ingredient behind my comparison of Guantanamo Bay to Nazi concentration camps was to get to the Nuremberg trials, the trials of those who were responsible for such abuses, tortures, and slaughters.
	The closer analogy to Guantanamo Bay rather than the obviously admitted death camps and genocidal camps of the Nazis would be the The Gulag system described by Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Apikalago, the torture system of the Soviets under, I guess, Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev and so on.
	Those camps in Russia were not specifically designed to kill people, but rather to torture and humiliate them based upon opposition to or At least apparent opposition to the existing communist order.
	Those would be closer. They weren't specifically genocidal.
	At least though they got to, I mean, he writes about this in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denezovich, at least they got out to do some useless state busy work, but the purpose of the camps was not to kill, but rather to torture, humiliate, and to serve as a punishment or warning.
	So that would be closer, but unfortunately there were no Nuremberg trials for the Russian Soviet camps, and therefore Russia did not make it out of autocracy because there was no, as far as I know, there was no autocracy.
	Truth and Reconciliation Committee, as there was under Mandela, after apartheid, there was no exhumation of these crimes, as has occurred in some countries in South America.
	And until we face the crimes of the past, we can never build the peace of the future.
	So I was talking about the Nazis really to talk about the standards of the Allies, particularly the Americans, around the Nuremberg trials.
	So I agree, of course, Guantanamo Bay is not where...
	Hundreds of thousands or millions of people are sent to be slaughtered, no question.
	But it was the Allies who were pushing for the punishment of those who tortured and killed people in incarceration situations in the Nuremberg trials.
	And that's really what I was talking about it for, not to draw a direct comparison between those two.
	But I certainly do appreciate people talking about the discrepancy.
	It's always valid and valuable to keep these things straight.
	Now, let's have a look at some material regarding Guantanamo Bay, and then we'll talk a little bit about what it's like.
	So, this is from an article.
	I'll post all of these links on the website, on the text link to the right.
	We have by now all seen much of this material before, but reading it all in one easy piece told by Human Voices in this book-length interview is not easy to take.
	Guantanamo, What the World Should Know by Chelsea Green, by Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray, becomes a heart-stopper once you cross the line and realize that you could be any of these victims.
	It's hard to say which is more disgusting, the descriptions of the torture or the bone-chilling analyses of Of how the President of the United States gave himself the powers of an absolute military dictator.
	Under Military Order No.
	1, which the President issued without congressional authority on November 13, 2001, George W. Bush has ordered people captured or detained from all over the world, flown to Guantanamo, and tortured in a lawless zone where, the White House asserts, prisoners have no rights of any kind at all and can be kept forever at his pleasure.
	Despite the, at best, marginal intervention of the American court so far, there is no civilian judicial review, no due process of any kind.
	While any military force will routinely violate the civil rights of anyone who gets in its way, Ratner's descriptions of how victims wound up in Guantanamo reveal wanton cruelty and callousness that will nauseate any sane human being.
	Ratner writes, quote, A lot of the people picked up by the warlords of the Northern Alliance were kept in metal shipping containers so tightly packed that they had to ball themselves up and the heat was unbearable.
	According to some detainees who were held in the containers and eventually released from Guantanamo, only a small number from 30 to 50 people in a container filled with three to four hundred people survived.
	And some of those released said that the Americans were in on this, that the Americans were shining lights on the containers.
	The people inside were suffocating So the Northern Alliance soldiers' allies shot holes into the containers, killing some of the prisoners inside.
	Some prisoners were captured in battle.
	This is disputed down in a moment.
	Many others were picked up in random sweeps for no reason at all, except being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
	As is usual in these kinds of operations, some were turned in as a result of petty revenge or as an excuse to steal their property.
	When asked in court to explain the criteria for detention, the government had no answer.
	There were no criteria, it appears.
	Quote, the government even made the ridiculous argument before the Supreme Court that the prisoners get to tell their side of the story by being interrogated.
	Ratner reports. One prisoner released after a year claimed he was somewhere between 90 and 100 years old, according to Ratner.
	Old, frail, and incontinent.
	He wept constantly, shackled to a walker.
	That could be any of us.
	And if we don't act strongly, it will be.
	Between January 2002 and January 2008, the Gitmo concentration camp held 755 detainees.
	Between the razor wire and conditions the UN described as equivalent to torture, human rights groups and detainees reject mere equivalents and insist torture was widespread.
	In due course, but not after anything remotely resembling due process, 470 detainees were released without charge.
	Both Habib and Hicks, these are two prisoners, claimed to be victims of profoundly inhumane treatment.
	In Habib's case, there's evidence of extraordinary rendition to Egypt to facilitate torture by third parties, but Guantanamo was bad enough.
	Four died in custody.
	There were any number of suicide attempts.
	Base Commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris Jr.'s response was surreal, quote, They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own.
	I believe these were not acts of desperation, but acts of asymmetric warfare against us.
	What a classified asshole.
	Right? If they try to kill themselves, they're actually aggressing against us.
	The overwhelming majority of detainees, including the two Australians, were rounded up in Afghanistan and Pakistan by bounty hunters.
	The U.S. military dropped countless leaflets, countless thousands of leaflets, offering $25,000 for al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects, this in a region of the world where the average wage is less than $500 a year.
	Get wealth and power beyond your dreams, one leaflet read.
	You can receive millions of dollars, enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life.
	Pay for livestock and doctors and schoolbooks and housing for all your people.
	Talk about an offer you couldn't refuse.
	Little wonder that a staggering 86% of detainees were rounded up by Afghan warlords or notoriously corrupt Pakistani police.
	Only 5% were arrested as a result of US intelligence work, which accounts for Gitmo being full of entirely innocent people.
	Some of these leaflets that were dropped were in comic book form without text because so many of the Afghanis are illiterate.
	Some of these detainees were children.
	One an 80-year-old paraplegic.
	U.S. civil rights lawyer Mavish Rukshana Khan tells the paraplegic story in her book My Guantanamo Diary, published in Australia by Scribe.
	Paralyzed by strokes 15 years earlier, Haji Nusrat Khan was taken to Gitmo on a stretcher, but that didn't save him from beatings, one of which broke his arm.
	Illiterate with 10 children, he has lived in a small mountain village near Kabul.
	The excuse for his incarceration was a cache of weapons.
	He explained that his son worked for the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai and had collected weapons on the president's orders as part of an official disarmament campaign.
	At Gitmo, he would demand to face his accusers but was told their names were classified and could not be released.
	But finally he was released, and back in Afghanistan he's been asking for a U.S. visa.
	He wants medical help for an injury he's had since fighting the Russians, but this time the U.S. doesn't want him.
	The Australian Daily, which is the largest Australian newspaper and per capita, one of the most popular newspapers in the world, has called Gitmo a concentration camp.
	In its edition of 3rd July, the Australian Daily, New Kronigseitung, Gitmo facilities are called notorious concentration camps, clearly drawing a line to Nazi concentration camps.
	Suicide attempts. By 2008, there had been at least four suicides and hundreds of suicide attempts in Guantanamo that are in public knowledge.
	No information is available on the number of suicides of prisoners that are classified secret or of their suicide attempts.
	On June 10, 2006, three detainees were found dead who, according to the Pentagon, killed themselves in an apparent suicide attack.
	Amnesty International said the apparent suicides, quote, are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention, and called the prison an indictment of the George W. Bush's administration's human rights record.
	Saudi Arabia's state-sponsored Saudi human rights group blamed the U.S. for the deaths.
	Quote, there are no independent monitors at the detention camp, so it is easy to pin the crime on the prisoners.
	It's possible that they were tortured, said Muflay al-Qahtani, the group's deputy director.
	Guantanamo officials have reported 41 unsuccessful suicide attempts by 25 detainees since the US began taking prisoners to the base in January 2002.
	Defense lawyers contend the number of suicide attempts is higher.
	As of August 2003, at least 29 inmates of Camp Delta had attempted suicide in protest.
	The US officials would not say why they had not previously reported the incident.
	After this event, the Pentagon reclassified suicides as, quote, manipulative self-injurious behaviors because it is alleged by CAM physicians that detainees do not genuinely wish to end their lives.
	In 2008, a hidden camera video was released of an interrogation between Canadian Security Intelligence Service and a Central Intelligence Agency officer and Omar Khadr, a youth held in Guantanamo Bay, in which the prisoner repeatedly seems to utter, Kill me.
	Kill me. Kill me.
	Well, this is where we've come to.
	Now, this enemy combatants is a completely fictitious classification of people who have been handed over for bribe money.
	And the same thing happened in Vietnam with assassination squads, which I understand is different, but the US military assassinated tens of thousands of people based just upon the hearsay or complaints of neighbors.
	And this, of course, just turned into a massive vengeful fest against everyone.
	Hitmen roaming the streets, basically, shooting whoever someone points at.
	But that, of course, is the definition of war.
	But the argument, of course, is that it's not fair or just to wage war without uniforms clearly identifiable and so on, despite the massive power imbalances between fighting people with aging and rusty Kalashnikovs and, you know, bombers that rain death from the skies.
	But for the U.S. to say that it is taking the moral high ground because its enemy combatants are not wearing uniforms is utterly, laughably, pathetically and contemptibly ridiculous.
	The United States has been doing covert operations for over 100 years in bases throughout the world.
	It has backed guerrillas in South America, in Iran, Saddam Hussein being one, in Iraq, throughout Afghanistan, in other areas of Vietnam, Cambodia.
	It has been behind the scenes, black ops, CIA, funding under the table, no uniforms, no even admitted presents, and then it has the gall to complain about other combatants who do not put on uniforms and come out to be bombed to death.
	It is contemptibly ridiculous, and of course, the US celebrates as heroic, noble, and wonderful The ragtag revolutionary war against King George's army in the 18th century, resulting in the temporary and semi-liberation of the United States from tyranny.
	And of course they did not wear uniforms, they were guerrillas, they were terrorists, but they are heroes!
	Whereas the Afghanis are scum who must be tortured.
	It is ridiculous that people would even reach for that moral standard while having praised its violation and continued its violation in so many areas throughout the world.
	So I'd just like to finish with just a few thoughts which I think are worth mulling over.
	An exercise of imagination.
	Empathy and virtue really are exercises of imagination fundamentally because if you can't feel these things there's really not much point thinking or talking about them.
	I want you to just think about You know, some poor kid born in Afghanistan.
	He has virtually no access to books and likely can't read.
	Of course, no internet, no newspapers, no access to even remotely objective outside information.
	He lives in a frozen bubble of history, reaching back to the late stone ages.
	He has only provided religious, which is to say superstitious and insane, instruction.
	He knows nothing about the outside world.
	He lives in a Dungeons and Dragons fantasy world of good and evil with no rational or empirical capacity to reach through to get the truth at all.
	His mind is poisoned, broken, degraded, humiliated, bullied, terrified, set against itself.
	Through the significant paranoia of superstitious religiosity.
	He has no information.
	He's blind, deaf, and dumb when it comes to the truth.
	And look at the amount of controversy there is even in the United States, which has a highly literate population with access to all the information at its fingertips through the internet, through free books at the public library, through free media.
	This Poor kid.
	Who has no idea what the world is.
	Hears that some guy named Bin Laden has launched some attack against the United States.
	He doesn't know this guy. He's just some rich, crazy, sick bastard from Saudi Arabia.
	Worth millions of dollars.
	He launched some attack against something called the Twin Towers, which he has no idea what they are, in some place called America, which is about as real to him as Gondor.
	And Bin Laden is about as real to him as Gollum.
	It's all fantasy in his mind.
	There's no truth. There's no reality.
	Some guy who apparently is hiding out in the country he lives in has launched some attack against some other guy.
	Buildings in some other country that's on the other side of the world and completely broken from reality in his fevered and insane imagination.
	Insane not relative to his circumstances, but relative to reality.
	The guy has no science.
	He's not taught. He doesn't even know the world is around, probably.
	And as a result of this Bin Laden fellow throwing some planes, which he's never seen, into some buildings that he can't even picture, he sees a plane, actually a formation of planes, for the first time flying over his village.
	And the next thing you know, he hears a dull whistling sound.
	And his village, and many of the people in it, evaporate.
	Into a fine, bloody mist of thin air.
	And he doesn't know why people are trying to kill him.
	He doesn't know where the planes are coming from.
	Maybe somebody says they're Americans, but he might as well have heard that they're piloted by hobbits or Ewoks.
	It doesn't mean anything real to him.
	And, you know, dazed and shell-shocked, he wanders around until some people who literally look like space aliens to him, right?
	Huge, no-neck marines with sunglasses and combat gear, drag him and throw him into a Humvee or a van or some detention paddy wagon.
	Maybe he has a gun in his house, and maybe he was told by the Taliban that if he didn't pick up a gun and fight these space alien hobbit Americans, that they were going to kill whoever was left in his family.
	Or maybe they said that we will shoot you dead if you don't pick up a gun and go over that hill, because that's what those in power do.
	And this guy, with no clue about anything in life, no possibility of understanding the circumstances of the geopolitics that have led to this disastrous evaporation of his clan and village, says, well, I don't want to get shot, so I'll pick up this thing called a gun, which I guess you pull this trigger, as they've told me, I'll go over this hill.
	Maybe he's shot, maybe he's just picked up and captured as an enemy combatant.
	As somebody who has a reasoned and virulent hatred of the United States based on a deep understanding of its foreign policy, you see.
	Madness! This is a blinded and disoriented mental child.
	This is like Mike Tyson getting into a ring and punching a disoriented and retarded and blindfolded boy in the face.
	I'm calling it a war.
	And he is taken, blindfolded, beaten, stuffed into a container where he has a one in ten chance of surviving a journey.
	Thank you.
	Those who survived may envy the dead.
	They clearly do because of the number of suicides.
	And he's taken in a plane, which is basically just a big humming tube that he doesn't understand with no windows.
	He's still blindfolded. People put out cigarettes on him.
	They beat him. Knock out teeth or two, I'm sure.
	And then he is taken to some place in the tropics.
	He doesn't know where he is.
	He might as well be on the far side of the moon or Jupiter.
	Or the ice planet Hoth.
	On a hot day. And he's locked in a tiny container.
	He's blindfolded. He's put in stress positions.
	He is beaten. May have his limbs broken.
	Starved. Sleep deprivation.
	Which is one of the greatest tortures.
	And this...
	This is his life.
	This is the...
	You know, poor broken bastard.
	That the entire combined might of the greatest military power the world has ever seen is bending its will to break and destroy because he represents such a fucking threat.
	Because what the military does is it fights existing wars with the goal of provoking future wars because it is a supply and demand industry.
	The reason the United States...
	has all of these 700 plus military bases overseas is to provoke conflicts and wars so that it can justify ever higher budgets.
	So I think that it's important to understand the nature of the, quote, conflict that we're in.
	And to understand that...
	I mean, it's not a death camp, but I do absolutely stand by that it is a concentration camp.
	And it is not just preying on literal children, though there were people as young as 12 and 13 years old in Guantanamo Bay.
	But if we don't get that it is also...
	Guantanamo Bay is a trial balloon that has floated up to get a sense of our level of moral outrage and empathy for our fellow livestock.
	You have much more in common with the poor broken bastard in Guantanamo Bay than you do with George Bush or Barack Obama or Dick Cheney or Paul Wolferwitz or Donald Rumsfeld or any of these clusterfuck war criminals.
	To what degree can we reach over the barbed wire and open our hearts to the suffering of these poor people, born into a crippling and catastrophic religious dictatorship stuck in the Stone Age, bombed into atoms, dragged,
	tortured, beaten, desperate, suicidal, To what degree can we achieve empathy for these people, these fellow livestock on the other side of the barbed wire, which is paid for by us being stuck in our own barbed wire and taxed and indebted and inflated into near financial oblivion?

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