Page 2 of 2 Iran: Blowback,
detainee-style By Karen J Greenberg
Levinson and has condemned Iran for
being "defiant as to the demands of the free
world".
Bush is correct. These detentions
represent a travesty of justice and a violation of
the rules of conduct among nations. It is
horrifying that these Americans, who are engaged
in foreign affairs at non-governmental and
scholarly levels, are held seemingly without
recourse to law and certainly without respect for
international rights.
But there is another disturbing reality
here that must be faced. In numerous ways, the US
has robbed itself of the right to proclaim the
very principles by which these prisoners should be
defended. Though Bush and his spokespeople may not
see it, their past policies have set a trap for
the US government - and for Americans generally.
More than five years after setting up the
prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and then
implementing national-security strategies based on
torture, secret prisons and illegal detentions,
the Bush administration has managed to obliterate
the moral high ground it now seeks to claim in
relation to Iran.
The new American
prisoners in Iran belong, in part, to a broader
diplomatic game of chicken now raging between the
two governments that began with the US capture in
January of five Iranian officials in Irbil, Iraqi
Kurdistan, prisoners the US continues to hold
somewhere in Iraq without charges. The more
telling context, however, is that of Bush
administration's detention policy from the moment
in 2002 when it set up its prison in Guantanamo,
offshore from US justice, to this day.
At
the inception of the "war on terror", the Bush
administration broke the very rules it now accuses
the Iranians of breaking. As part of a high-stakes
standoff with countries associated with Islamic
fundamentalism, it was the Bush administration
that first collected individuals, some guilty of
crimes, some simply swept up in the chaos -
initially off the Afghan battlefield and then off
the global one.
Often, it did so with very
little knowledge of, or care about, whom it was
rounding up. It incarcerated these prisoners for
long periods without releasing their names or,
often, their whereabouts; it refused to give them
the established rights of prisoners of war; it
defied the united protests of allies around the
world; and it sought to justify this whole policy
with the term "detainee".
In fact,
uncomfortable parallels between the notorious
Guantanamo and the grim Evin abound. At Gitmo, as
at Evin, information about "detainees" has often
been difficult to obtain. At Gitmo, as at Evin,
the government has been a champion of denying
prisoners access to lawyers. At Gitmo, as at Evin,
"national security" concerns invariably trump the
need to produce evidence or to indict prisoners.
At Gitmo, as at Evin, there have been repeated
reports of coercive interrogations and the
mistreatment, as well as torture, of prisoners.
At Gitmo, as at Evin, authorities deny
such accusations despite obvious evidence to the
contrary. One year ago, journalists were invited
to assess conditions at Evin for themselves.
Allowed to see only the women's section of the
prison, they were shown the medical facilities and
told about the excellent food the prison serves -
self-evident proof of the fair treatment of
prisoners.
So, too, media tours of
Guantanamo stress the quality of the food and the
superior medical treatment available in the prison
complex. At Gitmo, suicide is an ever-present
threat. At Evin, according to a British
Broadcasting Corp journalist on the tour,
authorities boasted of only one suicide in six
months - as if that were a record to be proud of.
Iranian authorities refused to discuss "political
prisoners" because "Iran does not recognize this
as a category". So, too, the most suitable term
for those held at Gitmo, "prisoner of war", has
been forbidden on the premises.
In all
these ways, but especially by wielding their
chosen term "detainee", and by defining
"detainees" as in essence without rights as
Americans would understand them, the Bush
administration has stripped the US of its
traditional standing as the foremost champion of
human rights.
It has relinquished its
bona fides to express the kind of moral
outrage that could indeed buttress international
support and legal due process for Americans who
have been illegally imprisoned. Even more
surprising, when administration officials,
including the president, denounce the Iranians,
they are tin-eared. The hypocrisy in their own
words just doesn't register. When Bush shows his
outrage at the imprisonment of Americans without
cause, evidence, or due process, it's as if he has
no sense that, in much of the rest of the world,
these are exactly the charges that ring out
against his own administration.
In
essence, a frantic, fear-filled,
information-impoverished but stubbornly defended
policy has finally blown back on America's own
citizens. This was something former secretary of
state Colin Powell - who last weekend called for
the closing of Guantanamo - predicted in January
2002 might well happen to captive US troops, if
not citizens, if the US refused to classify its
detainees in the "war on terror" as prisoners of
war.
Whether or not Bush hears the
hypocrisy in his own pleas, the fact remains that
his detainee policy has deprived the government of
a way of defending its own citizens on the
international stage. It has, in effect, amputated
the very legs it would need to stand on to protest
against the Iranian detentions.
Try as
they might, Bush administration officials can only
cry foul by calling attention to their own
systematic violations of justice and the law. In
their mouths, the appeal to fundamental rights
rings hollow indeed, depriving Americans of the
protections afforded by once-accepted standards of
decency and justice. Here, as on so many other
fronts, the president's fierce "national security"
policy has created an ever more insecure future
for the United States.
Karen J
Greenberg is executive director of the Center
on Law and Security at the New York University
School of Law and the co-editor of The Torture
Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor
of The Torture Debate in America. She
recently took a Pentagon-guided tour of
Guantanamo.
(Copyright 2007 Karen J
Greenberg.)
Tom Engelhardt is
editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission Unaccomplished:
Tomdispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts
and Dissenters (Nation Books), the first
collection of Tomdispatch interviews. Used by
permission Tomdispatch.
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