Apathy Sketchpad

The US has roughly 270 prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. None of these have had a trial and most have been there for months or years. While there, they are tortured, apparently as a matter of routine. Clearly this is immoral and illegal, and so there is obviously pressure to close the place down and either release the inmates or actually charge them with something. The question then arises of what to do with the inmates. Many of them would not be accepted by their home countries for various reasons, and the US says they are too dangerous to release in America. Defense Secretary Robert Gates estimated there were 50-70 such prisoners. The options appear to be either releasing them in the US or finding another country who will take them. Since these are people against whom no criminal case can be constructed, either of those should be pretty easy, right?

So, either to help out an ally, or to get in with Obama early on, or just to try to do something good for the world and hasten the release of illegally held torture subjects beyond those we’re legally obliged to accept, the Foreign Office has indicated that Britain might be willing to accept some of these people. This article has a comments box. That was never going to end well.

Quite simply the message from the Conservatives should be clear and unequivocal :

Britain must not accept any of these people.

The fact that some people who were originally held in Guantanamo and released went on to be come suicide bombers.

The risks are too high and Britian must now put its citizens first and not indulge itself in vague concepts of Human trights about non British citizens

POSTED BY: STRAIGHT TALK, SOUTH YORKSHIRE, BRITAIN | 1 JAN 2009 13:42:33

Someone on the site pointed out that in this context “some” was actually some figure between “not many” and “one”, but even without that, this guy’s argument could equally be used to execute all schoolteachers, since at least one of those has also committed a terror attack in this country.

We must not accept these people with the extended families they will bring with them remember if they come here we the taxpayers will have to pay for them also our soldiers which they tried to kill will have to pay for them this country is in a form of MADNESS it must stop

POSTED BY: DEE | 1 JAN 2009 14:40:27

It’s not even worth picking that run-on nonsense apart.

 this is george bush’s mess and he has to take responsibility for it. if brown accepts any people from it there will be a huge backlash. we haven’t forgot the london bombings.

POSTED BY: TONE | 1 JAN 2009 15:19:08
 

And if he can’t fix it in the next couple of weeks, then what? Sweep it under the rug?

 Why cant the US simply dump these folks back where they were originaly picked up? I’m sure they will find a ready welcome in Afghanistan, Iraq etc.

POSTED BY: DAVID | 1 JAN 2009 15:50:15
 

Because they’ll be killed and it’s illegal to deport people under those conditions.

 So hold on a minute….
The UK is not allowed to expel Islamic terrorists but we have to allow them in?
We have around 4+ million(not 1.8million as the government predicts) Muslims in the UK. At least 60% of them want Islamisation of the UK and are sympathetic to the Islamist cause.

I vaguely wonder where he’s pulling these numbers from.

Our government is allowing 5k Pakistani Halal butchers into the UK with their families even though we are supposed to have changed to a points based entry scheme that they do not pass.
We are importing Saudi Arabian Wahabism and the government does nothing. And now we are going to allow terrorists into the UK from Guantanamo Bay?

The point, you see, is that if they were terrorists, they would by now have been charged with something.

Who really British wants to live here anymore? I certainly don’t. Is this all part of the government’s plan to remove British people from the UK and build a new multicultural paradise doomed to all out future war as cultures start fighting one another for supremacy(No doubt Islam will be winner there).

I see.

This is madness. 
Then again our society deserves the government they vote in. If the UK is to fall unto a quagmire of Islamic terrorism and chaos, then you have yourselves to blame and not the government. Why? You voted them in to reap this destruction of your culture. Do something about it and vote them out. And I suggest also not voting for the Conservatives or the Liberals. They are no different to NuLabour and will continue the destruction of the UK. There will be only one benefit and that will be to the newly elected government members whose wages and perks will go up drastically.

POSTED BY: WINSTON SMITH | 1 JAN 2009 16:08:14

Well clearly he has thought this through.

You can be absolutely sure that they will be better treated by the British Government than our own servicemen.Thats Labour.

POSTED BY: ERICA | 1 JAN 2009 17:57:50

That sounds both true and relevant.

there should be the biggest mass demonstration on the streets of this country against allowing these people into this country thats ever been before, This should happen sooner rather then later before they become a burden to the british taxpayer.

POSTED BY: PAUL NOSWORTHY | 1 JAN 2009 19:29:53

I notice you have no security concerns: you’re just worried about immigration.

never ever thought I would say it ,but I cant wait until we have a BNP government.
just to end this lunancy.

POSTED BY: CARLYLE | 1 JAN 2009 20:10:13

The solution is clear: different lunacy.

No uk or non uk nationals caught fighting UK forces should be returned here. To accept such individuals constitutes a threat to our security and is a gross and blatant infringement of my human rights

POSTED BY: DAVE | 1 JAN 2009 20:42:37

Yes, but do you have an opinion about this story?

Carlyle,

I think you are not alone in your views. I think the UK is about to get a shock come next election. I also do not think that Conservatives will get the votes they are hoping for from disgruntled inhabitants of the UK. Many are realising that it will be the same old, same old with the tories, who incidentally set the ball rolling in the destruction of the UK.

POSTED BY: WINSTON SMITH | 1 JAN 2009 20:59:31

Presumably, then, you’re predicting a Lib Dem win, yes? That being the only possible outcome other than Labour, Conservative and a tie.

They should be allowed in to become investment advisors to the Church of England. They look like enviromentalists and the Archbisop needs advice.

POSTED BY: ROBERTO | 1 JAN 2009 21:35:03

What?

Has this loathsome Government any regard whatsoever for us?

POSTED BY: STEVEN | 1 JAN 2009 21:43:48

Let’s remind ourselves that they are the ones trying to stop illegal torture and you are the one arguing with them.

Suggest we house em on HMP Rockall

POSTED BY: DAVE | 2 JAN 2009 17:58:43

Suggest we don’t let you talk any more.

An immigrant, even an illegal immigrant can claim a jobseekers allowance and family allowance and housing benefit far in excess of my 80% war disability pension. Where is the logic in that?

POSTED BY: M WILSON | 4 JAN 2009 02:46:28

I imagine it’s the same logic that links this factoid to a discussion about Guantanamo.

This is what happens if you point out that they’re talking nonsense:

mattbramall – Are you living on cloud cuckoo land like Labour, have you forgotten about the innocent people who lost their lives in the suicide bombings in London.

I imagine he remembers them but correctly considers them irrelevant.

Do you really think these inmates are not Islamic extremists.

Yes?

UK security is a priority then suspected terrorists.

The Netherlands has made a stance, ruling out accepting any Guantanamo inmates. Also Dutch Immigration Service has expelled 1,475 people in 2008, the authorities expel foreign residents who have been sentenced to 1 month in prison or community work. The Dutch put their country & citizens first and if the Conservatives want my vote then they should be clear on putting British citizens first for security and welfare and tightening the Human Rights act to make it easier to expel suspected terrorists and foreigners declared persona non-grata. 

POSTED BY: QUIN WILLIAMS | 4 JAN 2009 10:03:24

I notice you keep using the word ’suspected’. If you replaced it with ‘convicted’ you would have a point, but then that point would be irrelevant. The point about suspected terrorists is that they might not have done it. Innocent until proven guilty and so on. I wonder with how much grace Quin Williams would accept his own deportation, detention and torture if there was suspicion that he might be a terrorist.

I had this on my Google Reader feed, but I thought it deserved highlighting properly: it’s the Divine Comedy’s song about Guantanamo Bay, with mildly naff video accompaniment. It’s good that people are doing this kind of thing — it’s disturbing how easy it is to forget about something like Guantanamo once it’s been out of the news for a while.

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.

This is a trailer for a documentary film about Guantanamo Bay. I include it because there’s a clip in it I want to point out. Anybody who saw The Late Edition on BBC4 the other day will have seen the same clip. It’s Donald Rumsfeld defending Guantanamo Bay. It’s pretty well right at the start of the video, and the really interesting bit comes right after the word “convention”.

I say “interesting”. Really “shocking” or “indefensible” or “moronic” would have been a better choice. In any case, there’s really not a lot else that can be added to that. And I can’t imagine any context in which that clip could be placed to make it seem okay, with the possible exception of immediately after an interviewer asking “how might a belligerent thug defend conditions in Guantanamo Bay?”. The conditions in Guantanamo are “consistent with the Geneva convention for the most part“. What an utter cunt.

A few days ago, an old manual for Guantanamo Bay was released. I say “released”. Leaked, really. It should have been released, of course, but then it should have said that the Red Cross were allowed to talk to all the ‘detainees’ (which is a polite word for “prisoners”) so you can see why it wasn’t. None of the news reports I saw actually included a link to the document itself, which to me seems like it would be a pretty important thing to include (hence I did post a link, and if you can’t find it then a Google search for “gitmo-sop.pdf” will find a list of mirrors).

It is, like all government documents, crushingly dull, but this one is livened up by the occasional patches of things-the-US-government-had-specifically-denied, and human rights violations. Of course, the US government have said that the document is out of date (it’s from 2003) and that now everyone gets access to the Red Cross, but then they said that in 2002 as well so they probably aren’t to be trusted.

But the thing that really baffled me was the full page illustration, with instructions, on how to correctly perform a Muslim burial. So your human rights are seen as unimportant when you’re alive but your religious convictions (which one way or another are probably why you’re in there to begin with) are respected even when you’re dead.

Who decided on those priorities?

From Thursday’s Times:

George Bush admitted yesterday for the first time that terror suspects had been held in secret CIA prisons outside US borders, saying that they were now being transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

Oh, well that’s alright, then, isn’t it?