Many Americans are fond of exhorting the mainstream Muslim community to take a more active role in denouncing the depredations of al Qaeda and their terrorist allies. The theory is that if Islam is a religion of peace, the truly faithful wouldn't permit murderous extremists to carry their standard, and the fact that such denouncements have not occurred to our satisfaction counts as evidence that perhaps the face of "true" Islam is accurately represented by the terrorists themselves. The more bellicose among us, it has further seemed to me, have even permitted this perceived lack of outrage to mitigate the regret one might feel at the often-indiscriminate death and destruction meted out in Muslim countries by the American military, as though merely sharing elements of a culture with violent criminals quite reasonably comes with a high but predictable price.
This week, Harpers Online published an article by Scott Horton, which lays out in exhaustive, stomach-turning, journalistic detail the evidence that in 2006, agents of the United States government tortured three men to death at a secret facility adjacent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Horton further outlines the facts that lead one to suspect the government of an immediate and far-reaching effort to cover up the crimes, by manufacturing evidence of a coordinated suicide by the Guantanamo prisoners, mutilating the bodies to prevent independent autopsies, and of course, telling lie upon lie upon lie to the American people.
One is of course free to dismiss this as a wild conspiracy theory, but I challenge you to do that after reading the article in full. This is not a brand new story; soon after the news broke in 2006, a group of law students and faculty at Seton Hall University pored over the official government reports and found dozens of anomalies and inconsistencies, which led them to suspect something was seriously amiss. But now, the evidence Scott Horton brings to bear includes corroborated reports from American military personnel at Guantanamo, some of them decorated, most of them with the most conservative and patriotic credentials. These are individuals who claim to have heard screams frequently emanating from a facility near Guantanamo that wasn't supposed to exist. Who say they saw the bodies of three men being delivered to the medical facility from outside the base, as opposed to from the prison block like the government said following the suicide reports. Who have taken great personal risk in telling the story Horton reports.
For what it's worth, even though it shouldn't much matter, the three dead men in question were quite far from the 'worst of the worst' typically associated with the US's 'enhanced interrogation' programs. One had been sold to the Americans for a $5000 bounty, under the shaky claim that he had once served as a Taliban cook. Another was found living in a flat where the government thought Abu Zubaydah may once also have stayed. Each, as it happens, were on a list of prisoners to be released from American custody, on the grounds that there was no evidence that they had the intent or ability to inflict harm on the national interest. This is the group that, after their deaths, the government claimed committed suicide in an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States, by binding their own feet and hands, shoving rags down their own throats, and hanging themselves in their cells, all at the exact same time, and all without base security noticing what was happening until it was too late.
Horton does not draw any final conclusions in his article, understanding that a criminal investigation is the only proper mechanism to do so. Indeed, one of the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by a Republican Congress, mandates that signatories investigate all credible allegations of torture-related crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has fully embraced a policy of "looking forward, not backward" when it comes to alleged crimes perpetrated by the Bush administration (outside those of a few low-level scapegoats), which of course puts him at odds with international law. In such an environment, there's not much for Horton to do but put the available facts into the public domain, which he has done without the notice, to date, of the liberally biased mainstream press.
If you've been reading this blog for a while - if you read this, this, this, and this , to note a few - maybe you're wondering if I don't take some kind of grotesque pleasure in continually writing about this stuff; if I've begun to crave the exposure of American malfeasance, because it satisfies some kind of newly minted, liberal, anti-authoritarian fetish. I assure you, that couldn't be farther from the truth. There's a reason why a terrorist attack on the citizens of the United States of America is a bonafide outrage - not just because it's where my family and I live, but objectively, transcendentally so. What makes this country special isn't geography or economy, or even culture - it's the one belief we all supposedly share, that government's authority over the individual is limited, by laws established by citizens of equal value, and more fundamentally than that, by the Truth of universal human dignity. Accordingly, the mere possibility that murder by torture of innocent people could have occurred in the 21st century, under the American flag, makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. And whether any of us like it or not, we are dealing with much more than mere possibility. Sooner or later, we will have to come to terms with all this, as we did with Jim Crow and Korematsu. That day can't come soon enough. In the meantime, though, we ought to take great care before judging too harshly the inaction of Muslims who fail to act strongly enough for our tastes against the criminals in their midst.
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