Springtime For Kafka

by digby

I wonder if other people are like me and wake up some days wondering how in the world the United States is going to be able deal with the moral and ethical failure of these last few years.

Take this story from the Washington Post this morning:

Abdul Ra’ouf Omar Mohammed Abu al-Qassim has been held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for more than five years, and he longs to leave it. But the one place the U.S. government is willing to send the “enemy combatant” — his native Libya is the country Qassim fears most.

Having exhausted all possible legal remedies in U.S. courts — including a petition to the Supreme Court in April — Qassim is facing possibly imminent transfer to Libya, a country that the State Department deems a regular abuser and torturer of its captives. Qassim, accused by U.S. officials of being part of a terrorist group that aims to overthrow Libya’s leader, expects that returning there means torture and perhaps death.

Qassim is one of the first detainees deemed an “alien enemy combatant” who is publicly fighting his departure from Guantanamo. His attorneys and at least one member of Congress have pleaded with U.S. officials to spare him from transfer to a country known for its human rights transgressions.

Qassim is among about 80 detainees at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release or transfer, and he represents a problem that could recur many times as the United States tries to clear out the facility: sending the men into the custody of nations known to employ torture.

Human rights groups estimate that there are more than a dozen men at Guantanamo slated to go to countries with spotty rights records. Absent court intervention, the men have no choice but to go where the United States sends them.

“It’s a huge problem,” said Shayana Kadidal, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights who represents Qassim. “It’s the number one crisis we’re dealing with. A large number of people who are cleared for release are cleared to go to countries where they likely will be tortured. They will be suspect just for the fact that the U.S. has detained them for such a long period of time.”

I honestly don’t know what the solution is. The US government kept a man locked up in Guantanamo for five years with no due process and has now determined that he can be set free with no apologies, no explanation, no hearings, no public findings, no lessons learned. And now nobody in the world will take this man because he is still designated an enemy combatant. His home country Libya, which considers him a dangerous radical for completely unrelated reasons that are antithetical to US interests, will take him and will probably torture him some more. The man claims he has never been anything of the sort but it’s impossible for anyone to judge that fully because the US government refuses to release any information about him.

This is repeating itself many times over as the military sobers up and realizes that they can’t keep these people imprisoned forever and now must grapple with the fact that they have created a bunch of global outcasts, who, largely due to our actions, will be subject to torture in their own countries. And nobody else will have them because they fear our treatment of them may have caused them to become the radicals and potential terrorists they never were before. Jesus.

I don’t know the answer to this one. The Bush administration gleefully “took the gloves off” and started behaving like marauding conquerers (mostly for cheap PR purposes, by the way, which makes it even more reprehensible) and now this country is faced with a horrible moral dilemma and a practical Catch 22. These people may not have been terrorists before, but our harsh and irrational treatment means there’s an excellent chance we’ve made terrorists of them now. (Call it the “Count of Monte Cristo” effect.)

9/11 caused this extremely powerful nation to profoundly lose its moorings and it exposed a side of ourselves that we need to look at very carefully and thoroughly over the next few years. Guantanamo may be the lasting symbol of that fevered time. It will be closed, it has to be. But I would hope that it is kept open as a museum to remind Americans of what can happen when they allow simpleminded cheerleaders and greedy war porn distributors to sweep them up in irrational, martial excitement and act out of sheer (racist) revenge. It was a mistake of epic proportions that may end up rivaling the invasion of Iraq as to which Bushian atrocity caused the most international hatred and mistrust for the United States.

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