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This article from the Economist analyses the prospects for renewing the Transatlantic Alliance - before it's too late.
Yet in the longer run the chances of better transatlantic co-operation may be greater than they seem at first sight. The reason is simple. For both Europe and America the long-term outlook is quite bleak. Global acceptance of American leadership has diminished both because of the Iraq war (and Guantánamo) and because of the rise of emerging powers with different ideas about how to order the world, some of which carry a whiff of 19th century great-power rivalries. Today’s Europe has little military clout, and is in demographic and (relative) economic decline.
A lot of articles on the economy and on the new administration coming to the US in January 2009 all take as a given that the power of the US, and indeed of "the west," is definitely on the wane. Some put the high-water mark back as far as 1948, although I would disagree with that. I think 1989 has at least as strong a claim. But there is no argument at all that the eight years of the Bush administration hastened the end for America, and a surprising number of pundits agree with me in pointing to Hurricane Katrina as the smoking gun that proved it to be so.
It's not just I who am saying, it's The New York Times as well. I think they hit the nail on the head with this one.
 The family of Jamil el Banna, photo from Guardian Unlimited
There are breaking stories in two on-going sagas of British residents/citizens caught in the web of the US courts. First, the Guantanamo four: the British passport-holding inmates of Guantanamo were returned to Britain some time ago, but four remaining detainees were British residents, though not citizens, some with very strong ties to Britain, such as close family who are citizens. The Blair government, in its wisdom, probably sacrificed them in order to get a swifter and more favourable deal for the passport-holders. Or something, who knows. I have been following this story intensely since the first cages were erected at "Camp X-ray" and the whole business just sickens me. In any case, three of the four have been returned to the UK just this week: Abdennour Samuer, Omar Deghayes and Jamil el-Banna. (El-Banna is 45, but looks at least 60 in his picture.) Although Samuer was released with no further questions (all three men may be subjected to control orders at some time in the near future if they choose to remain in the UK), Deghayes and el-Banna were arrested in the UK before they got a chance to see their families who were left waiting and uninformed. Apparently it is Spain who is the culprit now, alleging that the two were members of a Spanish cell of al Qaida, although there is very little if any evidence of this. One piece of evidence is a video-tape of Deghayes training men in Afghanistan, but it has been shown conclusively that the named person is not him. Both men were finally released on bail and reunited with their families yesterday.The other story concerns a British citizen with dual US citizenship who has been on death row most of his adult life and just hours from execution on several occasions. It is now generally conceded that he is completely innocent, but due to the intricacies of the case, he had to enter a plea bargain of no-contest to reduced charges to be released from prison. Kenny Richey will not be home for Christmas after all, due to falling ill with heart disease just as he was about to enter the plea bargain that would automatically lead to his release. He has had severely deteriorating health during his time on death row, not surprisingly.
This is classic, this is supremely stupid, this is adding insult to injury in a whole new level, this my friends, is irony writ large! After years of to-ing and fro-ing, trying desperately to find a fool-proof way to prosecute and convict the clearly "bad people" illegally incarcerated in Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Bush Administration and the subservient Congress got a law of sorts to use in its endeavours, based primarily on an acceptable (to the Supreme Court, hopefully) definition of this new phenomenon the "illegal enemy combatant".
Armed with their pristine new law, the military prosecutors prepared documents for their first best case (and clone them for all the other cases waiting in the wings) and sallied into court only to be thrown out of court by their own hand-picked judge because, unbelievably, they failed to use the terminology of the law designed just for these cases. The defendant in the case was never called in the suit an illegal enemy combatant, but merely an enemy combatant. God may be on the side of the big batallions, but He occasionally likes to deliver a backhand slap to those with the tiny intellects, and the moral vision to match.
Why is this not news? OK, so I'll stop being disingenuous. Why is this news being censored? OK, you're right, even that is a naive question. Why are none of the leftist blogs in the US or the UK covering this? Are they not aware? Is there some pernicious angle to the story not apparent to me that makes it OK that there's a virtual news blackout on it in the US and only low-key coverage in the UK? I heard a brief discussion on the BBC (Radio 4) but it was at just past 6 in the morning and not repeated. It's not in the Guardian; it's in only tiny, ultra-liberal US print media. A blog search turned up nothing. A Google News search found a few stories including the one above, but the only "major" papers carrying it were Canadian or Caribbean. What's the deal?
The story as covered in the Guardian. The four men have been taken into police custody, despite protests from their many supporters and the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which believes they need treatment before interrogation. However, experts says thay can expect to be released within days.
No, I did not miss the story that the remaining Britons held at Camp Delta were to be freed, announced rather quietly a little over a week ago. I just neglected to blog about it. To be fair, they aren't here yet, are they? And the whole deal is being done in a very opaque manner, the better to frighten the populace, I suppose. It's also not as if just releasing these men, after a long and brutal detention with no obvious crime having been committed, is going to make the wrong go away, or the political embarrassment to the UK government.
And it's not as if they are closing Camp Delta down; that would be the only just outcome, to end all of the illegal horrors that may or may not go on there.
Following directly on from the story below, the Observer today has this piece about a number of retired or serving military officers and experts who are now coming forward to blow the whistle on the dubious intelligence value of Camp Delta interrogations. I wonder if it is because Bush is just now beginning to appear like a lame duck after his poor showing in the debate? Or is it just a coincidence in timing? Whatever the reason, this week will see the publication by British journalist David Rose of "Guantánamo: America's War on Human Rights" which contains the testimony of Ret. Lt. Col. Anthony Christino and three other intelligence officials against Bush and Rumsfeld's pursuit of the war on terror. Among other things there are charges that "the 'screening' process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guantánamo was 'hopelessly flawed from the get-go'" and that "General [Geoffrey] Miller [former commandant of Camp Delta and now running Aby Ghraib prison] had never worked in intelligence before being assigned to Guantánamo, and his system seems almost calculated to produce entirely bogus confessions."
Caution: Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo content.
A few days ago, Body and Soul posted this excellent post about Seymour Hersh's book Chain of Command and a fairy tale that she was reading to her daughter called Ella Enchanted. This may seem like an odd juxtaposition but it is not. And it gave rise to this beautiful bit of prose from Jeanne:
The idea that evil is stupid is comforting in a children's book. It is not comforting in Hersh's.
I haven't gotten very far into Hersh's book, but so far, this is what I know: Within a few months of the Guantánamo Bay prison's opening, three things were obvious:
1. The Bushies wanted prisoners treated harshly in order to extract information quickly.
2. Treating prisoners harshly wasn't going to extract information -- quickly or otherwise.
3. The vast majority of Guantánamo prisoners had no information to give.
Bush and Company believed so firmly in the first point that the easiest way to kill a career was to mention the second or third points. Not that some people didn't try -- but they failed to have any influence. To have any interest in facts, any connection to reality, was to be branded soft on Al Qaeda.
Some of the Guantánamo prisoners were mentally ill old men. Under different circumstances, they might have had promising civilian careers in the Pentagon.
The New York Times has an almost blow-by-blow account of the arguments before the US Supreme Court on the question of the legality of "indefinite detention". This case is about US citizens, rather than non-citizens such as those held at Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Supremes heard that case last week, but decisions have not been handed down at this point. It is striking how disingenuous and cynical some of the government's arguments are in this case. For example, when asked by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor why a "neutral decision maker" could not have been used to screen detainees before they were committed to detention, government attorney Paul D. Clement said 'the potential detainees' initial screening, sorting those to be held from those who need not be, met that requirement. "For all intents and purposes, that is a neutral decision maker," he said.' Excuse me? Then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked why the detainees were not given a forum to explain themselves, and Clement replied "The interrogation process itself provides an opportunity for an individual to explain that this has all been a mistake." (Note that in earlier cases the government's legal team saw no reason why torture in interrogation should not be permitted in certain cases. Hey it worked for centuries in the past - like the 12th through the 17th centuries. Why forsake a proven formula?) This government demonstrates over and over again that they hold most of the world and its institutions in contempt and clearly think they can and are entitled to get away with literally anything.
The case of Rasul v. Bush was heard by the Supreme Court yesterday. The Center for Constitutional Rights brought the legal challenge to the US's indefinite detention of foreign nationals by filing habeus corpus petitions over two years ago.
Jeanne of Body and Soul has an update on the upcoming hearing for James Yee, the Islamic chaplain to the prisoners at Camp Delta. Initially arrested on suspicion of espionage, he has never been formally charged with anything. The military lacked evidence for espionage, so Yee was released, only to be charged with downloading pornography and adultery. (I don't know about you, but I find that ironic on several levels.) Neither of these latter-day charges is very well-supported and it is possible that they will be dropped. Supporters believe he was charged with whatever came to hand, to prevent him speaking out about the conditions at Camp Delta.
In the Guardian's ongoing special report on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, James Meek has a two-part analysis of the situation in Camp Delta. In the first part, he offered this frightening possible reason for the existence of the detention camp:
But, as US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the military in a revealing slip in April 2002, "We have been successful in not eliminating al-Qaida." Having failed to find the suspected mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, his Taliban ally, Mullah Omar, or much in the way of terrorist infrastructure, the US set about constructing, behind razor wire on a secure Caribbean island, an incarcerated model of what its "war on terror" rhetoric implies. It has gathered terrorism suspects from all over the world, imposed discipline and order on them, encouraged them to hate the US and kept them together for years. It was as if the Bush administration so wanted the Hollywood fantasy of a central terrorist campus to be true that they built it themselves.
I am not the only person to have chosen this particular quote, as it happens, but as I didn't get this from another blog, and in fact was going to post it yesterday but it didn't work on my work computer, I have no reason to credit anyone other than the Guardian. But it gives me a feeling sort of like warm fuzzies to see all these people I never met who think along the same lines.
There is thorough coverage in the Observer of this story, which I heard on the news on TV this morning and also read in The Agonist and several other blogs. Very good news.
As published at Guardian Unlimited Politics. No, there is no joking going on here. Just make of it what you will. I will say only this: notice how old Tone squirmed out of the Guantanamo question.
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