Torture in the Bush Gulag: The public relations battle

This is a good summary of the current public discussion of the torture scandal: The Image War Over US Detainees by Peter Grier Christian Science Monitor 06/06/05

The Bush administration appears to have opened a whole new front in its war on terror: a forceful, full-scale defense of the morality of its detention-camp policies.

First came harsh criticism of Newsweek magazine for its since-retracted charge of Koran abuse at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. More recently top officials have pushed back - hard - against Amnesty International's use of "gulag" to describe Guantánamo's conditions.

The intensity and coordination of administration remarks on this issue may reflect a belated recognition of the stakes involved. Rightly or not, to much of the world the abuse of prisoners in US custody may now be emblematic of American foreign policy as a whole. ...

It's fascinating how the Republicans are trying to change this into an argument over the political correctness of the term "gulag" - or, in my preferred Al Gore version, "the Bush Gulag." Essentially, what they are saying is that Amnesty International (AI) showed bad manners in using the term.

As I mentioned in the comments to my previous post, conservatives have used the term "gulag" for decades when they wanted to run down a country that they want the US to invade or bomb. To pick just one example, the illustrious Victor Davis Hanson, a favorite "middle-brow" rightwing flak, wrote (See Ya, Iraq? National Review 09/16/04):

In contrast, for the last year and a half, the United States has paid a high price to ensure the Iraqis a chance for the first humane and civilized government in the entire Arab Middle East. If it was callous to abandon the Shiites and Kurds in 1991, it is certainly right now to ensure that Saddam's gulag is not superseded by either a Taliban theocracy or a Lebanon-like cesspool. (my emphasis)

Maybe the Freepers split hairs while comma-dancing on that one to verify whether every nuance of Saddam's prisons - of which Abu Ghuraib was the most notorious - merited the description "gulag." I didn't follow the particular reactions to that column, I must confess.

Back to the Monitor article:

Yet beneath this struggle over spin, the two sides appeared to be making different points. The word "gulag" is ugly on several levels - harsh on the ear, harsher in meaning. The administration focused on the Soviet gulag's human cost, making the point that whatever abuses have occurred at US detention centers are a grain of sand compared with the hundreds of thousands of casualties suffered by those who disappeared into Soviet prisons. Amnesty International was trying to make a point about the mystery and injustice it believes is inherent in the US approach to detainees - that many are being held indefinitely without trial, in unknown locations.

This is a continuation of the argument, "Well, Abu Ghuraib was bad but, but, those Muslims cut off people's heads!!!" In the early years of his regime, Hitler once used the news of the lynching of a black man in the American South to say that blacks in America were treated worse than Jews in Germany. And at that particular moment, it was probably true.  (By 1938, when the annexation of Austria and the Kristallnacht riots occurred, it wasn't true any more.)

Once again, we should all be realistic about the issue: the United States under Bush is practicing torture. Illegal, sadistic torture. It's wrecking the US reputation abroad. It's having serious repercussions in terms of military discipline, probably more severe than we're hearing publicly. It's damaging the image of the armed forces at a time when recruitment is missing its targets and the military is already stretched thin in Iraq. We can talk endlessly about how much we all honor the soldiers and so forth. But most people are not terribly thrilled about going into a war like the one in Iraq. And who would want their child, parent, sibling, friend, co-worker or their own selves to show up in an Abu Ghuraib-type photo? Anyone who's been paying attention will not have missed that it's basically only the lowest-level perpetrators that have been prosecuted and/or disciplined over torture.

And the harm all that's doing is not changed by how much torture is going on in places like Syria, Egypt or Uzbekistan to which, well, the Bush administration is outsourcing some of the torture.

Laura Rozen sums up the problems with Guantanamo very succinctly (War and Piece blog, 06/05/05):

Close Guantanamo, argues [Sen. Joseph] Biden, and dang if that doesn't seem like the best move USG Inc. could make at this point, with PR and security benefits. The current situation of endless leaks of abuses, legal  limbo, detainees wrongly snapped up, quiet deals between the US and other countries to extradite their nationals, Gitmo detainees being transferred in secret to prisons in such dubious human rights locales as Uzbekistan, a harsh international media spotlight on CIA front airlines illegally snatching subjects of mistaken identity to one of Gitmo's satellite prisons and then dumping them back months later after they finally cleared up the person's innocence, and no successful terror prosecutions must surely outweigh any of the intelligence obtained.

The PBS Newshour on Friday featured a debate between William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA and Neil Livingstone, the CEO of the "risk management" firm Global Options, who staunchly defended Bush's torture policies. The Monitor article also quotes Schulz from a Sunday interview, saying he "conceded that their language may have overreached."

Maybe so. But it doesn't exactly sound like that to me in Friday's discussion:

Well, let me say first this that this is, of course, not an exact analogy. There are differences between the Soviet gulags, differences in size. We don't expect, we have no reports that there is forced labor at Guantanamo or the other U.S. detention centers or that people are being starved.

But there are similarities. The United States is maintaining an archipelago of prisons, many of them secret prisons in which people are being disappeared. They are being held in incommunicado detention without access to the judicial system.

That is similar to the gulags. They are being held without access to their families; that is similar. And in many cases, they are being mistreated, abused, and even killed. In fact, there have been at least a hundred deaths of detainees, 27 of which have been ruled to be homicides by medical examiners.

Actually, I was impressed at how firmly he stuck to the case that AI is making against the Bush Gulag. I wish that more guests on these talk shows that allegedly represent the liberal side would make as firm a case. In Schulz' case, I would like to think he was not taking a "liberal" position but a "human rights" position that liberals and conservatives both support. Obviously, the real politcal world in the US today is not like that, though.

When Livingstone challenged him on the wording, Schulz said:

Now, whether we Americans likeit or not, the reality is that not just Guantanamo Bay but the whole system of U.S. detention facilities and the way detainees have been treated by the United States is regarded as analogous to gulags and is regarded as a tremendous atrocious stain on the reputation of the United States.

So I can acknowledge that for us Americans, this may well seem like hyperbole. But by focusing so much on the semantic debate the administration is attempting to continue the cover up of what has been a systematic policy of torture. (my emphasis)

I was especially struck by this defense of the torture policy by Livingstone:

MARGARET WARNER: Final last question: What about the idea of just having an independent inquiry, a 9/11-style inquiry in which instead of the Pentagon investigating itself -- and there have been many investigations -- somebody, an outside group of reputable well-known people does it?

NEIL LIVINGSTONE: Margaret, we're still at war and we're still getting intelligence from some of these people. I agree; not all of them. And there's still some sorting out. We don't need to do that today. We are at war.

Maybe at some time in the future we can go back and look at the accountability and do so reasonably well. But I think these people still have value and it's good to keep most of them off the street, quite frankly. (my emphasis)

Yes, maybe, some time, in the future, with all deliberate speed, around the time Hell freezes over, the Bush supporters might start thinking it's a good idea to rethink some of the policies.

But the  part that especially caught my attention was, "we're still at war... We are at war."

Bush fans love to use analogies to the Second World War to describe their Dear Leader's magnificent achievements and grand challenges, which he of course is facing bravely. So it's worth looking at a more empirical measure than the Bush fans typically use.

The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was on December 7, 1941, one of the best-known dates in American history.

V-J Day (Victory over Japan Day) was August 15, 1945.

Count the time. It was three years, eight months and one week, give or take a day or two.

The so-called Global War on Terror (GWOT) began September 11, 2001. Today is June 6, 2005. The GWOT  has been going on for three years, nine months. It's already longer than the Second World War for the United States - and with no official end in sight. If Bush has really decided that the GWOT has already been won, then soon we'll hear Republican flaks trashing the very concept that the GWOT went on longer than the Second World War. Or maybe they'll just deny there ever was a GWOT, who knows?

But if we are going to accept torture and other suspensions of American law for as long as "we're still at war," we might as well be realistic about what it means. Accepting them permanently.