Apathy Sketchpad

BBC News tells me that US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said in a statement (how else does one say things?) that it would be impossible to close the thoroughly illegal and indefensible prison at Guantánamo Bay because of

that irreducible 70 or 80 [prisoners] who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home.

…

“The problem is that either their home government won’t accept them or we’re concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home.”

…

Yet these 50 to 70 prisoners could not be charged either, he said. This is presumably because there is not enough or no evidence against them.

If there’s no evidence against them, let them go. If their home countries won’t take them, let them go in America — if you didn’t want them in your country, you shouldn’t have dragged them there in handcuffs (see later). If there’s evidence, charge them. That’s how legal systems work in all countries except for fascist dictatorships.

And maybe some of them will go on to commit acts of terrorism after you release them. Well, that’s the risk you take, but the fact is you’re not fighting individuals. You’re not even fighting an organisation. You’re fighting an ideology: extremist Islam. The individuals don’t matter — keep one in prison and another will attack you, and he’ll be angrier. You don’t fight AIDS by killing the HIV-positive.

The aim of extreme Islam is to turn the world into a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy. You don’t respond to that by becoming a fundamentalist Christian dictatorship as the Republicans would seem to. If you don’t respect the fundamental human rights of your prisoners — against whom you can’t even construct a case — then you’re no better than the terrorists: you think you can get away with this stuff because you’re the Goodies and they’re the Baddies but to torture the enemy and imprison them indefinitely without trial is to lose sight of why you’re the Goodies. Western civilisation is better than fundamentalist theocracy purely because it’s democratic and transparent. It’s more important to society that justice is seen to be done than that justice is done. The government must remain answerable to the people, and the Bush administration seems to believe it is above them. It abuses their rights, lies to them, and does so in secret — strictly, of course, Guantánamo Bay is in Cuba, where US laws do not apply. The Bush administration rather pathetically thought that people would be placated by this. The contempt they show for their citizens here is shocking: they think that although the people should have to live according to the law (including people in other countries if they might have some oil handy), the government should be free to get around these laws in whatever way they please. In fact, the government are the people who it is most important that the law applies to — there’s very little else to keep them in check.

If you respond to fundamentalist Islamists with no respect for human rights by becoming fundamentalist Christians with no respect for human rights then the terrorists lose, but so do you and so does everybody else.

You’re just different Baddies.