Gitmo: significant victory for human rights

With all the continuing, terrible news about Iraq it was good to hear of one small but significant achievement for the global human rights movement.
Namely, Monday’s decision by Judge James Robertson of the US Federal Court in Washington DC, in the case of long-time Gitmo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan, inwhich he judged that:

    * The Geneva Conventions applied to the conflict in Afghanistan and to all people in the conflict;
    * The combatant status review tribunal (established by the Pentagon after the Supreme Court

24 thoughts on “Gitmo: significant victory for human rights”

  1. Well, that’s nice … but I suppose it will lead to a much higher rate of ‘disappearances’, ‘ghost detainees’, and ‘renderings’ – all devices to move US prisoners beyond scrutiny or protection.
    I have been thinking about the communal politics of Iraq again, though this is not the thread for it I know : suppose that, to counter the idea of a Shi’a anti-US regional axis developing, based in Iran and extending to Southern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, Eastern Saudi Arabia, Yemen, etc., the aim of the USA is to create in Iraq a secular pro-West Shi’a ascendancy which will then spread to all the above-mentioned places and use the numerical preponderance of Shi’a (‘democracy’) against the possibility of anti-Western Shi’a militancy (‘theocracy’)? This would explain why first Chalabi then Allawi had to accept the role of figurehead, and why Sistani is simultaneously anti-US and pro-elections. It’s a naive project : if the Shi’a followed it they would end up in the role of a manipulated minority dependent on US protection (vis-a-vis the Sunni world as a whole), even while actually not being a minority at all (in the narrower sub-region centering on Iran).

  2. I thought the previous supreme court ruling was a ‘victory’ This administration has never followed an opinion they disagree with, they won’t start now. Look who Bush just appointed attorney general. The new attorney general is the guy who ‘wrote the book’ on detainee treatment for this administration.
    Helena, did you read this column in the LA Times today? http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-weiner10nov10,1,1222506.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
    do you believe this is even possible? In my opinion it is the answer to the Palestinian/Isreali situation. Particularly the part about walking up to settlements.
    Do you believe, at this point, the Palestinians are culturally able to even take a step like this?

  3. Sorry, this is another thread, but has anyone heard any reaction from the Shi’it leadership concerning Falluja? This is the defining moment for civil war.

  4. Peter, why would the attack on Falluja be the defining moment for civil war? Do you mean civil war between Sunnis and Shi`is? If so, what about the Americans attacking Falluja would make it the defining moment for such a conflict?

  5. Shirin, maybe Peter is following my train of thought : the pressure from below must be on Sistani to follow the example of the Iraqi Islamic Party (a Sunni party which withdrew on the 9th from the Allawi government, where it had a cabinet post, over Fallujah). What I tried to explain about the naivety of the Shi’a, who are a majority in the sub-region, becoming dependent on US support, as if they were a mere minority, must be widely understood, though I don’t know how to explain it clearly.

  7. Rowan, I am sorry, but I still don’t see how the American destruction of Falluja can be seen as the “defining moment” for a civil war, presumably between Sunni and Shi`i.

  8. Well, I agree with you there, Shirin, the idea of a ‘defining moment’ is bit simplistic. It’s only in retrospect that historians will say, “at point [x], actor [y] was forced to choose between alternatives [p] and [q]” – and then other historians will pop up and say ” no, you’re quite wrong it was at point [n].”
    The expression ‘civil war’ is also a bit misleading because it assumes a unitary nation-state within which matters are ‘civil’ as opposed to a set of external relations within which they aren’t. All borders created by colonial powers are products of divide-and-rule thinking and should not be taken as any sort of expression of genuine nation-state separations.
    The Ottoman borders were not based on this sort of thinking, though it is true that the Ottoman provincial rulers sometimes acted autarchically.
    Persia, of course, was never part of the Ottoman system, although it was briefly occupied by Ottoman forces in the 17th and 18th centuries.

  9. Rowan,
    Please forgive me, but while what you said is interesting, it appears to me that you have not addressed my question.
    Let me rephrase the question in simpler terms. What has the American destruction of Falluja to do with civil war between Sunni and Shi`i?

  10. It was another poster, a certain Peter Hoffman, who used the term ‘civil war’. The argument I have been trying to develop doesn’t use this term and as I have explained it is a loaded one. I am simply interested in the dynamics of the Shi’a world, irrespective of borders wherever they may be, since I see it as what I call a ‘strategic variable’ – something that the US seems to be trying to manipulate, or to some extent to take for granted, possibly not wisely.

  11. p.s. – just to clarify all this : consider the situation of the Kurds. Within what they themselves define as ‘Kurdistan’ they are, naturally, the majority ; however, within each of the four post-Ottoman states within which ‘Kurdistan’ is currently subsumed (Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria), they are minorities. This makes them easy to manipulate externally and is the basic paradigm for what I normally refer to as ‘divide-and-rule’. The delineation of the borders which makes this tactic possible is exactly analogous to the ‘gerrimandering’ of constituency boundaries in what are blindly called ‘democracies’.
    Now the Shi’a world is divided in exactly the same way but on a larger scale, except for the fact that there remains at its centre one unreconstructed Shi’a state, namely Iran. Apart from this, Shi’i (thanks for the plural) are minorities everywhere from Pakistan to Lebanon, and from Yemen to Syria.
    The Qutbist strategy as outlined in the Zarqawi letter (it matters not whether this was real or bogus, since the whole Qutbist project is in my view a conscious or unconscious Western pawn), is to combine the anti-Western radical Sunni uprising with an assault on Shi’i. To the extent that Badrists and SCIRI supporters in Iraq allow themselves to be used as occupation cat’s-paws, they play into this strategy, and as I have pointed out the Qutbists have been announcing a number of killings of Badrist ‘collaborators’ in their communiques. This I regard as a terrible weakness in the whole Iraqi anti-occupation struggle, and Muqtada al-Sadr has certainly appealed repeatedly to both sides to reconsider this set of alignments.

  13. Well, I am trying to in a way, but I can’t answer for Peter Hoffman, and we shall have to wait for him to check back in and do so himself.
    Denizens of the US (I don’t like to say ‘Americans’ since this is one of those words like ‘Semites’ that is a product of hegemonic pre-emption) are accustomed to using the expression ‘civil war’ as if it were an exact and morally neutral description of something, but it can never be. As a matter of fact this sort of language construction has been fairly well analysed by Marxists, at least up to a point. Their argument is that because the ‘bourgeois state’ uses the rhetoric of pluralism (even though the only plurality of interests it really recognises is that of the cliques of capitalist interests), it pretends to stand above regional and confessional factions, but this is really just a cowardly representation that ordinary citizens use to hide from their own fears with. A good exercise to overcome this is to never use the term ‘we’.
    By the way, I notice that Free Arab Voice etc. have stopped doing what I was complaining about, which is congratulating themselves on the number of Badrist ‘collaborators’ they have just killed. Maybe they are reading this site!
    Don’t you think there is an artificial polarisation between the o-so-radical Sunni ‘intransigents’ and the o-so-complaisant Shi’a ‘collaborationists’? Is it really possible to ignore the tit-for-tat mosque bombings in Pakistan? Would it surprise you if they started occurring in Iraq and elsewhere? And yet, who would gain? Only the US and its satraps – no one else – certainly not either of the parties concerned…

  15. Rowan, I am sorry, but I find your responses incoherent in terms of my question regarding the attack of Falluja as the “defining moment” for civil war between Sunnis and Shi`as. Perhaps it is simply that we are on totally different wavelengths.
    I do wonder whether you are aware of the virulent and exrremely crude and ugly anti-Shi`a sentiments on the part of some of the extreme Sunni elements, such as the Zarqawi gang. They express these freely, have always done so, and need no encouragement from the U.S. in this regard.

  18. “Sistani has been criticized recently for not speaking out against US attacks on Sunnis in the way he had with regard to Najaf, a Shiite center. Sistani likes to present himself as concerned for the welfare of all Iraqis, not just of his Shiite followers. But he is only called for peace in Fallujah when the fighting is already largely over with. That move will look cynical to a lot of Sunni Arabs.” (Juan Cole, today).
    –the word I used was ‘disingenuous’, but it means the same. Now get off my case, Shirin – I have enough of a problem not yelling at the trolls.

  19. Rowan, I simply cannot find a way to connect your remarks to my questions. I have been attempting to have a conversation with you in an effort to understand the connection. I have felt no animosity toward you, and have remained entirely civil and courteous toward you. I am sorry that you cannot do the same toward me.

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