“President Bush…continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America’s strategic catastrophe in Iraq.
“I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.”
This is from a speech that former Vice-President Gore gave at Georgetown Law Center on June 26, 2004.
(Source: Old Hickory’s Weblog, Torture in the Bush Gulag: How prissy should we be in talking about it?June 5, 2005.
The full text of Mr. Gore’s address is at Common Dreams .)
Exerpts from Gore’s speech:
“[T]here has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President’s policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation’s conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse – and even torture and murder – by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes.
“In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." At least we don’t have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.
“By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant and overbroad." But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo – that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information – most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals.”
[…]
“War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the President, nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the Secretary of Defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the National Security Advisor.
“Always before, we could look to the Chief Executive as the point from which redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a President and an administration for whom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.”
“In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend up on a debased department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution" are words that should hang in the air.”
If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do.
]]><I> Well said.
Amnesty International didn’t invent “gulag” as a metaphor for the US detention scheme. Excerpts from two articles which use the term synonymously, and pre-date the Amnesty statement, appear below. (Use the links to access the full texts.)
Google gulag + guantanamo to find more such instances.
December 5, 2004
TORONTO SUN
By Eric Margolis—Contributing Foreign Editor
The Lubyanka Prison’s heavy oak main door swung open. I went in, the first western journalist to enter the KGB’s notorious Moscow headquarters—a place so dreaded Russians dared not utter its name….I explored the fascinating museum of Soviet intelligence and was briefed on special poisons and assassination weapons that left no traces. I sat transfixed at the desk used by all the directors of Stalin’s secret police, on which the orders were signed to murder 30 million people…
I saw some of the KGB’s execution and torture cellars, and special “cold rooms” where naked prisoners were beaten, then doused with ice water and slowly frozen…Other favoured Lubyanka tortures: Psychological terror, psychotropic drugs, prolonged sleep deprivation, dazzling lights, intense noise, days in pitch blackness, isolation, humiliation, constant threats, savage beatings, attacks by guard dogs, near drowning.
Nightmares from the past—but the past has returned.
According to a report leaked to the New York Times, the … International Red Cross has accused the Bush administration for a second time of employing systematic, medically supervised torture against suspects being held at Guantanamo Bay, and at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The second Red Cross report was delivered to the White House last summer while it was trying to dismiss the Abu Ghraib prison torture horrors as the crimes of a few rogue jailers. According to the report’s allegations, many tortures perfected by the Cheka (Soviet secret police)—notably beating, freezing, sensory disorientation, and sleep deprivation—are now routinely being used by U.S. interrogators.
[…]
All of these practices flagrantly violate the Geneva Conventions, international, and American law. The Pentagon and CIA gulags in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan have become a sort of Enron-style, off-the-books operation, immune from American law or Congressional oversight.
Suspects reportedly disappear into a black hole, recalling Latin America’s torture camps and “disappearings” of the 1970s and ‘80s, or the Arab world’s sinister secret police prisons.
The U.S. has been sending high-level anti-American suspects to Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and, reportedly, Pakistan, where it’s alleged they are brutally tortured with violent electric shocks, savage beatings, drowning, acid baths, and blowtorching—the same tortures, ironically, ascribed to Saddam Hussein.
Protests over this by members of Congress, respected human rights groups, and the public have been ignored. President George W. Bush just named Alberto Gonzales to be attorney general, his nation’s highest law officer. As White House counsel, Gonzales wrote briefs justifying torture and advised the White House on ways to evade or ignore the Geneva Conventions.
Grossly violating the Geneva Conventions undermines international law and endangers U.S. troops abroad. Anyone who has served in the U.S. armed forces, as I have, should be outraged that this painfully won tenet of international law and civilized behaviour is being trashed by members of the Bush administration.
Un-American behaviour
If, as Bush asserts, terrorism suspects, Taliban, and Muslim mujahedeen fighters not in uniform deserve no protection under the laws of war and may be jailed and tortured at presidential whim, then what law protects from abuse or torture all the un-uniformed U.S. Special Forces, CIA field teams, and those 40,000 or more U.S. and British mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan euphemistically called “civilian contractors”?
Behaving like the 1930s Soviet secret police will not make America safer. Such illegal, immoral and totally un-American behaviour corrupts democracy and makes them no better than the criminals they detest.
The 20th century has shown repeatedly that when security forces use torture abroad, they soon begin using it at home, first on suspected “terrorists,” then dissidents, then on ordinary suspects.
It’s time for Congress and the courts to wake up and end this shameful and dangerous episode in America’s history.
January 3, 2005
THE PROGRESSIVE
Matthew Rothschild
Welcome to the Bush Gulag.
Unconstrained by a Supreme Court decision last June that required at least some semblance of due process for detainees, the Bush Administration is now contemplating lifetime detentions for suspected terrorists without granting them access to any courts, according to an article by Dana Priest in The Washington Post. So Bush will be sending detainees to some modern-day Siberia to rot for the rest of their lives.
[…]
Why is the moral onus on the West? I don’t recall any decapitations east of, say, Darfur recently. Are you implying that the Arabs are incapable of bearing the moral onus of their own actions? Isn’t that a bit racist?
]]>It is absurd to suggest that I was trying to make a cheap political point there. It’s a cheap point, sure, but it ain’t political.
]]>Gitmo isn’t a new Gulag: it’s Gitmo. Why call it something else? Object to it for what it is, and examine it according to America’s obligations under international law.
Otherwise, do we get to look forward to an annual "Gulag of the Year" award? I can only ask again: can you compare degrees of suffering? I can’t.
My final point, and the most important one: what good is any amount of narcissistic debate among politicians, NGOs, and bloggers (hey, I obviously indulge myself here as much as anyone, if not more) going to do about it?
Ah, well. It’s very late, the world hasn’t changed, and I’m going to bed. I resolve to start spending my time more usefully tomorrow.
]]>http://www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/voices/nickcohen2.htm
]]>On the subject of numbers of Stalin’s victims, it’s true that estimates for the number of victims in total range from 20 million (Conquest) to 10 million (Alec Nove), the number of deaths in the Gulag forms only a small portion of this number; the majority of Stalin’s victims died in the famine of 1932-3, outside the camps. Mike Haynes writes:
‘in the years 1928-53 there were possibly one million camp deaths (most in the war years) to which must be added . . . 86’582 prison deaths between 1928 and 1951’ (A Century of State Murder?, p. 69)
This also does not include victims shot before the reached the camps, as were all the Old Bolsheviks and others such as the Polish officers in Katyn. Andrew Wheatcroft suggests a overall figure of 1 million purposive deaths in the 30s, and 9 million preventable (Ibid, p. 70). The point is to assert that ’20 million died in the Gulag, therefore Guantanamo is not a Gulag’ is based on a claim which is historically untenable.
On the wider use of the word Gulag by AI, it appears that to use such language by supporters of the US/UK – how often was Stalin described as analogous to Hitler or Stalin, or the Iraqi resistance as fascists? – is legitimate but when critics of the coalition start to use similar language it becomes impermissable.