A Voice on a Paper Cup

Look, my country is better than this.

“Your country” (and mine) has ceased to exist. It has become something unrecognizable.

Excellent post.

This is precisely the angle through which much of the world views this administration’s policy of “spreading democracy and defending freedom”

Sorry, on the second thought – it is the opposite. But it might’ve been better to demonstrate a different pattern of treatment in the good old times of the same kind of person as this Dost guy, that’s what I meant.

Y81, your point is?

I don’t exactly see what the point of this post is. To reaffirm that there are problems with Guantanamo? Yes, we all know and believe that. But why should we “just.stop” defending what is good about America, when there are so many who would have the world view this country through the narrow funnel of posts like yours? I’m not going to “just.stop” as you plead with self-importance — I would rather comdemn America when it deserves it and praise it where it merits it.

“But why should we “just.stop” defending what is good about America”

I’m not finding where Belle says that. “Just. Stop.” refers to something else entirely.

Barry, a claim is made by Belle that “my country is better than this”–what a lawyer would call an ultimate finding of fact. The basis for this claim, implicitly endorsed by uncle kvetch, is that the U.S. treated prisoners better in WWII than we do in the WOT. I am very skeptical of that claim, and point out that a story from Belle’s grandfather doesn’t really amount to an evidentiary basis. If, as I believe, we are treating prisoners about well as we always have, Belle’s claim, and uncle kvetch’s jeremiad, have no factual basis.

Y81, we also know, of course, the history of WWII, and how prisoners were treated. Much, is known beyond Belle’s anecdote, which is more of an exmaple for illustration rather than a data point.

Since anecdotal evidence is enough to condemn the US in the GWOT, how about some from WW2?
“11:30 The American GIs in a frenzy or horror, anger and guilt gun down some 122 captured German soldiers – most of them Waffen SS. Dozens of inmates break out of the prison enclosure and kill approximately 40 guards, some with their bare hands. Private John Lee of I Company later told newspapers that he was personally involved in at least 60 of the killings.”
(http://www.humanitas-international.org/archive/dachau-liberation/)
None of these Germans were given so much as a hearing. Maybe one of them was even a poet.

“Which makes me seriously wonder whether Belle Waring has ever cracked open a copy of The Gulag Archipelago or has any idea what is to found there.”

An innocent guy getting accused of a crime he didn’t commit? Just guessing.

Steve Burton (and other human scum like rd, y81 and Chris H),

This guy spent nearly 3 years in prison for what can only be described as a thought crime against an ex-president of the United States. You don’t think this is like a gulag? Sure, Siberia was a harsher prison perse, but the overall outlines of the story are the same. That Cuba’s God-given weather is warmer than Siberia, and the American captors provided somewhat milder tortures (for the moment, anyway) doesn’t change much.

Fine, we’ll send you to Guantanamo Bay for three years without a trial and see how you enjoy it.

As publius properly notes, prominent Republican politicians (who are both actually a. Americans and b. have many political followers who have a reasonable chance of carrying out their wishes) repeatedly openly threatened President Clinton’s life. If anything, many of them were rewarded by greater government power and honors since 2001, much less not punished.

Ann Coulter has openly called for terrorism against other Americans. Not only was she not punished with a three-year stay in a Cuban jail, she is on the cover of Time Magazine. She has been a repeated speaker at many meetings of prominent Republican politicians and has repeated threats of terrorism at those very meetings.

Only tyrannical regimes destroy or hide writings which they have already admitted are harmless (the US already released Dost the person after a short hearing, so they’ve officially admitted he is not much of a threat, if any). Yet, why are his writings being withheld from him? I don’t mind if the US keeps copies of his writings, but why are they with-holding the writings themselves?

Y81 intentionally refuses to understand that the entire basis of why the US fought the Nazis is being urinated upon, every minute, by our government’s current tyrannical and obscene actions. Of course, the US punished Nazi war criminals after World War II. The critical difference is that they went to great lengths to figure out who was an actual war criminal, provided real trials with real appeals (not thirty-minute long fake show trials which wouldn’t even have passed muster under Stalin) with real defense counsel provided and did not torture the merely accused. Nazis whose main crime had been writing satirical poems about FDR or Hoover were hardly bothered (after all, the US had enough trouble getting their hands on people whose hands were literally dripping blood).

That’s the difference – the US was once a humane, civilized and law-abiding nation. And now it’s…..something else.

burritoboy: you call me “human scum?”

steve burton,

The man got sent to prison for writing a poem about Clinton. As an emigre from the former soviet union, I feel that a comparison with the Gulag Archipelago is quite apt.

Your response to this – essentially “but he was wrong to write the poem – osama is worse is clinton” – deserves no further reply.

Steve, every single word you utter dishonors the United States of America. You would be better served to wipe your ass on the flag than type another word. Is this what America means to you? “Not as bad as Stalin”?

We imprisoned some guy for three years without trial on the words of some Pakistani cleric. (Am I really typing these words? “Pakistani cleric”? Who the fuck cares what some Pakistani cleric says?) As a proud member of the “mistakes were made” brigade, that’s good enough for you. But as people who believe that America means something, not for us.

Jeez, the trolls y’all get.

steve burton,

…the man was imprisoned because of unspecified accusations made, post 9-11, by an unnamed cleric linked to the Pakistani government. The reader is given no reason to believe that these accusations related to his earlier anti-Clinton essay.

Its strongly implied. Anyway, one is hardly less atrocious than the other: the imprison a man on the grounds of mocking Clinton, or to imprison him based on nothing more than the word of a personal enemy. Its obvious from the article that the case against him was incredibly thin from the beginning.

Now imagine some guy in the Lubyanka c. 1935. He’s been accused by a minor Soviet functionary of being an anti-government agent. Among his papers they find a satirical essay calling for the death of Stalin.

How much would you wager on him coming out of it alive?

Not bad, in fact. My bet would be a sentence in a labor camp.

Ever heard of Osip Mandelshatam? A great poet who wrote a personally demeaning and satirical attack on Stalin in 1933 (“His fat fingers slimy as worms”); he was let go without punishment. Unfortunately, he was caught writing more of such stuff in the next few years, and was executed five years later.

As for the rest of your “arguments,” they are intellectually facile. You seem to interpret the comparison “X is like Y” to mean “X is like Y in every respect.”

Lets see: Stalin arrested people on flimsy accusations and shipped them off to Gulags where they were tortured.

The United States of America arrested this man on incredibly flimsy evidence, took him to Guantanamo where

…Americans sheared off their beards, forbade them to wash, shoved their faces into the dirt and screamed curses in their ears during frequent interrogations.

Certainly, Stalin tortured his victims far more, but if you don’t see parallels, you are blind.

Steve, if you are actually upset by what happened to Dost (as you imply), then why are you arguing the position you are? If Belle was comparing after-school detention to the Gulag, then maybe you’d have a real point.

Terry,

Your argument seems to be “if we aren’t as bad as Stalin yet, we’re A-OK.” The fact is, we seem to have imprisoned and tortured a poet for a combination of thought crimes and the hearsay of his personal enemies (his personal enemies in Pakistan, of all things).

You seem to take comfort in the fact that Dost is an “other” from us. Well, I’m not quite as comforted by the fact that Dost has brown skin and the unfortunate heritage of being a Moslem and an Afghan, and I don’t. I’m not so certain my white skin and Judeo-Christian religion and European nationality will continue to protect me infinitely. A regime that tortures poets (and, moreover, tortures poets for incredible trivialities) is not one I can so easily trust.

Damn! Some unnmamed branch of the government has already found me. One of the citizens says he’s a fishmonger and the other says he’s a machinist, but they both carry pistols. They smell like NKVD to me. While they’re distracted (they’ve noticed a ‘No War’ bumper sticker on my neighbor’s car) let me tell you something that may save your life.
When I die from starvation and the beatings at Gitmo prop my body up against the wall. The guards may not notice I’m dead and you can share my bread ration. It worked in the gulag, It may work at Gitmo.

And Burritoboy, you’re attacking a strawman.

“detached observer”, every country in the world is like the USSR in some ways. No country in the world is like the old Soviet Union in “all ways” and probably all are like it in “most ways”, depending on what you think the defining characteristics of the Soviet Union were.
Sorry about ending that last sentence with a proposition.

Terry, I’m not normally a praying man, but I hope to God that you are shipped off to Guantanamo on the basis of an anonymous tip, so that three years from now I can sanctimoniously explain how we’re not as bad as the Soviet Union under Stalin. Please God, just this once…

This was a good post.

Why is everybody wasting time debating with people who attack it on unfounded bases by trying to change the subject to how ooofully awful some other country at some other time was?

I don’t like Bush. I don’t like his administration’s contempt for the Geneva Conventions. I don’t like Gitmo. Nonetheless, I’d have to say that we’re talking “world’s smallest violin” material here.

Why is everybody wasting time debating with people who attack it on unfounded bases by trying to change the subject to how ooofully awful some other country at some other time was?

So we less courageous don’t have to.

I know i’m glad someone is dealing with the tiring routine of deny/minimize/look at the silver lining/change subject common to many bushophiles. It’s dirty (you know, bush didn’t say there were wmd in irak).

On the top of my mind, lately it’s the lancet study, the bushco movement against unions, and a few others topics who had their “arguing the obvious with partisan bigots” moment. C.t. is fun in many ways, these threads make it useful.

For both at the same time, there’s fafblog :)

Ignore the trailing comment at the end of my last comment. That was a draft I pushed away.

detached observer: you say “it’s strongly implied” that the accusations that got Dost imprisoned related to his anti-Clinton essay. But the Post article does not report what the Islamic cleric in Peshawar told the Pakistani intelligence agents or what they told the US. All one gathers is that Dost was accused of links to the Taliban and/or al Qaeda. If the satirical essay was the sole basis for that accusation, then his arrest was ridiculous and shameful – like when people in airports get all but strung up for joking about having a bomb in their luggage. But the article just doesn’t support that conclusion.

To imprison a man based on nothing more than the word of a personal enemy is, indeed, atrocious – if you know that’s what you’re doing. Unfortunately, finding out that an accusation is false and/or badly motivated may not be a trivial task. Since neither you nor I knows exactly what Dost was accused of or who his accuser was, we are in a poor position to judge how credible the accusation might reasonably have seemed at the time.

I’m not sure why you think that the case of Mandelstam supports your view, given that (a) you don’t indicate that anyone accused him of being an anti-government agent, and (b) he eventually ended up dead, apparently just for saying mean things about Stalin. Rather a good illustration, to my mind, of the huge gap between the Gulag and Guantanamo.

I do not “interpret the comparison ‘X is like Y’ to mean ‘X is like Y in every respect.'” But I do think that tendentious comparisons to the Gulag do more to discredit than to strengthen the case against American procedures at Guantanamo and elsewhere. They just look hysterical. I mean, here is abb1, going off about some respect in which “Bush’s junta-style fascist regime in Gitmo, Afghanistan and Iraq…[is] much worse than Stalin’s period…in the USSR” and uncle kvetch kvetching about “hypernationalistic thugs…drunk on jingoism.” The only thing that prevents this sort of thing from being really offensive is that it’s just so silly.

mfb: please note that Ms. Waring launched her post with a comparison to the Gulag. That is presumably why people are talking about that comparison.

antiquated tory: I wish that I had said that.

Great post, awful thread. It’s healthy for supporters of the War on Terror (like me, for instance) to be reminded where this could all lead if we are not careful. But if you want to treat stories like this as proof that we’re there already, the warning has no meaning, does it?

For those throwing around phrases like “human scum,” just try to imagine that maybe those who disagree with you also think they’re pursuing justice and peace.

PS: Both these stories concern the attempt to undo mistakes we’ve made. I can almost see Secretary Rice saying something like Just. Stop. (Especially the second time.)

Since neither you nor I knows exactly what Dost was accused of or who his accuser was, we are in a poor position to judge how credible the accusation might reasonably have seemed at the time.

Excellent point, Steve Burton. We don’t have all the facts, so who are we to judge? There may have been perfectly good reasons for the American government to imprison Dost in Guantanamo.

Likewise, the military may have had perfectly good reasons for detaining Khaled al-Masri for five months, and shackling him, and beating him, and photographing him in the nude, and drugging him, and then unceremoniously dumping him off in Albania. Who are we to judge?

And I’m sure you have perfectly good reasons for instinctively leaping to the defense of the most powerful military force in human history, and minimizing and rationalizing anything that even appears to be wrongdoing on its part.

We just don’t know the facts, so we should just keep our mouths shut–or, if we absolutely must speak out, we should do it in calm, reasoned tones, always remembering to sprinkle in generous amounts of “Yes, but” so that reasonable people don’t think we’re silly.

Jonah Goldberg hawked ‘The Clinton Tapes’ on eBay, didn’t he? Time to send him to Gitmo.

steve burton: thanks for letting me know

Thanks, Walt. I very nearly wrote the same thing.

Well, comrades, I made it. In the last episode I was about to be arrested by an unnamed gov’t agency and hauled down to Gitmo. Well, I knocked out the guard, stole a parachute and jumped from the plane seconds before the plane touched the runway. With my rugged Aryan looks and my lily-white skin I should be able to pass myself off to the workers on the base as a ecologist investigating the decline of the local rainforest. I’m submitting this post from my blackberry as I tromp through the jungle . . .
Oh my gosh! It’s worse than I thought! I’ve never seen so much razor wire! And the dogs! The Yanks have got the poor bastards organized into work gangs and they’re heading out to the cane fields. Poor bastards, they’ll work them from sunrise to sundown on a starvation diet. And look! There! That low, cinderblock building in the middle of a malaria infested swamp! That must be where they keep the hard cases! How can the work gangs be so large? The government says they’ve only got five hundred people at Gitmo.
Oh. I see. Damn.
I’ve landed on the wrong side of the fence.

The Independent reports:

…Mr Deghayes was terrorised by one technique – shoving prisoners into a chamber nicknamed the “snake room”. The Libyan claimed: “One day they took me to a room that had very large snakes in glass boxes. The room was painted black and white, with dim lights. They threatened to leave me there, and let the snakes out with me in the room. This really got to me, as these were such sick people that they must have had this room specially made.”

Over his two months in Afghanistan, he added, they starved him of food for nearly eight days, deprived him of light “for days on end”, “effectively suffocated” him in an airtight box, and subjected him to beatings and being forced to live naked for long periods “as part of the humiliation process”.

He added: “The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films … Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams of others in the rooms above us, as they were tortured and interrogated. My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They chained me, and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn. They would force me to my knees for questioning. They would threaten me with more torture.”

Steve and Terry make me question how broadly I show cast my burning rage and hate. Obviously it should not be limited to a few bad leaders at the top of the torture chain, but extends above them to many, if not all, of the people who voted for torture and war crimes. May I hate, with a passion that will not fade with time, 40+ million people? Or have they deniability, like the Germans who enjoyed the victories and spoils without responsibility?

I am told I am a bad person for spreading the blame so far. The Holsclaws and Charles Birds say “torture bad” but “George Bush very good!” and they must be forgiven and presumed pure and innocent.

There are weapons and tools big enough to fit my fantasies of revenge, but I know I will never get my hands on them. And the people who might, Kerry and H Clinton and Edwards, won’t even use them against the thugs the rank-and-file Republicans hired to fulfil their sick psychopathic desires.

Opps, sorry did not proof read, last remark accurately enough. Meant to say “In the inmortal WORDS of Emily Latolla”

This will be my last entry. My Blackberry has been taken by the guards. Fools. Those inbred hillbillies will never learn how it works. They think it’s a cell phone. I’m using a hidden feature in WordPress and posting this comment via carrier pigeon.

Little did I know, comrades, when I made that intemperate remark about our president (comment #34) I would be apprehended by an unnamed branch of our government & packed off to Guantanamo. Nor did I foresee that my attempt to escape would leave me stuck in one Fidel’s prison camps (comment #63).
Fortunately I was able to escape that hellhole by bribing the guards with a carburetor from a ’55 Ford Fairlane. I always carry one. I darkened my complexion and hair with walnut juice (thanks for the disguise tip, Fess Parker!) and so made my way to the coast without being betrayed by my rugged aryan good looks and lily white skin (stop me if I’m being repetitive). Once on the coast I assembled a raft from scrap wood and started paddling towards Amurrica.
Unfortunately I was picked up by the US Coast Guard. Seems they have some stupid “wet foot-dry foot” rule so they were going to send me back to Castro’s socialist paradise. The only way out was to reveal my true identity.
So here I am, in Gitmo. I lost an eye in a prison riot when I got into an eye-gouging contest with one of the guards, but other than that I’m fine. The interrogation wasn’t as bad as I thought. I had menstrual blood smeared on my face but, jeez, like that’s never happened before. The hallucinatory horror of the snake room turned out to be hallucinatory, and that was kind of a bummer. If the infant Hercules could strangle the snakes Hera sent to kill him, how much trouble could it be for an adult with my superior genetic matrix to take care of a few crawlies? And what is it with menstrual blood and snakes in these interrogations? Somebody needs to read up on their Freud.
So don’t feel too sorry for me, comrades. I’ll probably be here forever, but I’m not completely without resources. I’ve been translating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Esparanto in my spare time. I write messages on cigarette rolling papers and send them off via carrier pigeon to friends in the US.

I can’t post to CT anymore because I’m down to my last pigeon. I had three at one time, but one was killed by a bunch of rethuglican golfers. It landed on the putting green of golf course in Mississippi and the rethuglicans mistook it for the last of the passenger pigeons and promptly beat it to death with their clubs. The other missing pigeon dissappeared over the gulf a few secnds after the deadly American missile defense system got a radar lock on it. I fear for the worst.

Odd that no one thought to mention that the “genuine” gulags had to start somewhere. I doubt they sprang up, full-blown, from the tundra. Let’s not talk about the slippery slope obliquely. We have taken a fork in the road, and the point here is that we better be careful we don’t go too far to turn back.