I need, as a US citizen, to place on record that I am completely sickened that my government continues to hold detainees in Guantanamo and other locations in complete defiance of the norms of human decency and international law.
Over the weekend, three of the Gitmo detainees committed suicide, an act that can be thought of or described in many different ways. (Several reports of the loading of enslaved African persons onto transatlantic transports in previous centuries spoke of a number of the enslaved people either hurling themselves into the water or sitting quite still, refusing to eat, and dying through the sheer will to do so… The legal status of the Gitmo detainees under the US’s much-vaunted legal code seems little different from that of the enslaved persons.)
But the death of a human person– by his own hand or that of anyone else– is always, first and foremost, a tragedy.
What has happened to the souls of people in the Bush administration that they can respond to these tragedies in Gitmo with such unabashed hostility? Various administration officials have described the suicides as “a PR stunt” or even “an act of (asymmetrical) war“? Has Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Colleen Graffy, who made the accusation about the suicides being “a PR stunt” completely lost her humanity?
People who speak in such a way seem deeply soul-sick to me. How on earth can we end their ability to wreak their present, quite immoral havoc on the world?
23 thoughts on “Guantanamo and soul-sickness”
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It’s very sad. I guess the only silver lining is that it completely undermined Bill Oreilly’s special on guantanamo, which was filmed in the days prior to the suicides and was meant to cast the situations of the prisoners in a positive light.
I have no idea what will work to stop this madness.
But I will continue to make four calls a day, Monday to Friday: White House, 2 Senators, and Representative. I address them by “Mr.” or “Mrs.”, not by their titles. They don’t deserve their titles.
And I will continue to tell them to get out of Iraq and close down Guantanamo, and that I think they are both immoral and illegal.
Sometimes I call other US Senators or Representattives.
It takes less then 10 minutes a day, by the way. I figure it is the least I can do, considering they are living in this USA-made Hell 24 hours a day.
You wrote, “people who speak in such a way seem deeply soul-sick to me.”
Yes, I agree, and thank you for voicing that thought. When I first saw Colleen Graffy’s comment, my heart sank. I could only think that this represents what has happened to our society since initiating this war. An unimaginable lack of compassion for human beings under the control of our military.
I also felt that Bush’s suprise visit was an almost unbelievable gesture of humiliation to another head of state. Al-Maliki should have refused to see him.
Frankly I am more sickened when suicides affect another 20 or 40 innocent victims. Or another 3000 in the case of 9/11.
Helena-
Like the Germans after WWII, we will need a whole new vocabulary after this period is past. Think of all the English words these thugs have tainted beyond cleansing: freedom, democracy, terror, security, homeland. The corruption of language is a known threat to civilization, and must be countered. The Chinese have been through this many times in their long history, and their philosophers have studied the problem of rectifying names:
“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”
From The Analects of Confucius, Book 13, Verse 3 (James R. Ware, translated in 1980.)
This may sound too farfetched for most of you but I would like, nonetheless, to suggest a social theory that predicts the grim political developments we are currently witnessing.
A culture with the strength to drive human behavior toward a positive future in an orderly manner derives its strength from the depth of its internal consensus that the ideology at the core of the culture’s self-definition is absolute truth. This condition has existed in the American culture for many years. Values such as the sanctity of individual self-sufficiency, freedom of expression, democracy, capitalism, and free markets, have presumed to be absolute within the culture. In the case of the U.S. such values are accepted as absolute by many outside the culture. It is natural therefore to presume the rest of the world would be far better off if they bonded to that ideological consensus. That natural, ney, instinctive assumption is the source of much difficulty.
1) Other cultures are constructed around other values that are likewise accepted therein as absolute.
2) Two definitions of the absolute cannot co-exist. They will war against each until one prevails, or both collapse. Witness the Cold War.
3) History is litered with the remnants of cultures once thought to be absolute.
4) When such a culture is stressed those bonded to that culture will never conclude the embedded idealogical values are false. They will always conclude the problem resulted from an impure and/or insufficiently courageous expression of those values. The solution will always be a more pure, more courageous and bold expression of those ideals.
5) The solution is also the root and driving force behind tyranny . . . tyranny has always been driven by noble purpose.
6) The problem with tyranny as a solution is that it causes the ideological truth to eclipse the human rights and human provision that was once the foundation of the consensus that empowered the culture.
7) Therefore the grim determination to “make the culture prevail at all costs,” is in reality a self-destructive force.
8) All dominant cultures in human history have similarly self-destructed. The American culture is in an advanced stage of self-destruction.
What to do about it? That discussion will have to come later.
Dale
So much for “extremely distasteful pathological analogies…”
Dale
I might be out of topic, but this caught my attention, I read this and I wonder how long this going on in US and dose it means this behavior common in US culture in different ways of life rather than this case when people starting their life to be in workforce.
” In a survey of nearly 62,000 undergraduates on 96 campuses over the past four years, two-thirds of the students admitted to cheating. The survey was conducted by Don McCabe, a Rutgers professor who has studied academic misconduct and helped found the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/18/technology/web.0518cheat.php
The question is what truth these people can tell us? And how truthful the are leading and guiding the nation?
Salah,
The younger generation are an excellent indication of the strength of a culture. If the culture offers significant identity and purpose young people will bond to the culture and appropriate its ideology and morality. If the culture does not its ideology and morality means nothing to those people. If the failure of significant identity and purpose is accompanied by serious negative experience the young person will erupt in rage. Such was the case in the Columbine High School rampage. The culture typically reacts to such events with grim determination to force compliance with cultural expectations. The resulting onset of tyranny is self-destructive because it fails to address the cause of the problem, and constitutes a “negative” experience for the young person that will cause further alienation. This same construct applies to wide spread cheating by college students, and is a good measure of cultural weakness.
Dale
Frankly I am more sickened when suicides affect another 20 or 40 innocent victims. Or another 3000 in the case of 9/11.
Posted by Davis at June 13, 2006 09:28 PM
And that is why this situation is both tragic and ironic. No evidence was presented that this men planned attacks, much less suicide bombings of others. One of the men was on the list to be released, and deemed no threat to the USA. The ironic part comes in with the fact that their relatives and loved ones, full of pain and rage, totally frustrated and hopeless in seeing any justice done for their dead relatives – may feel driven to do suicide attacks against other people.
It is a huge tragedy all around, and the suicides in Guantanamo do underline the American abondonment of any moral principles.
Abondoning our moral prinicples made us less safe.
Bush siad” “I’d like to close Guantanamo, but I also recognize that we’re holding some people there that are darn dangerous and that we better have a plan to deal with them in our courts,” Bush told a news conference in the White House Rose Garden.”
What plan he need to get? Four years five years no single one brought to justices obviously there are no evidence that you can argue in the court isn’t?
The world gets sick and tired of this.
Best send them to their home countries to those friendly regimes those you trusted them they do the job for you they will Tortured, killed them all without headache for you they new how they do it, they are very skilled better than you in this just ask the Human Right Watch they will tell you the history of those friendly regimes torturing history.
Or you know them very well by your experts who trained them as we saw their skills in Abu Grab and other places in Iraq.
Referring to the elected officials in the US with only the honorific of “Mister” actually has a long tradition in the US. If I remember the story correctly, back when George Washington became the first President of the republic, there was some discussion as to how to refer to the holder of this new office. Suggestions were made along the lines of “Your excellency”. George Washington instead stated that for the leader of a republic, “Mister” was the only honorific needed.
That this tradition has been lost, and that nowadays it seems odd or even rebellious to refer to our elected representatives as “Mister” only shows how far away from a government where these people are only citizens like the rest of us. These representatives should be considered a citizen just like any other. No special benefit or privilidge should go with the position. And it should be expected that these representatives are only serving the nation temporarily in the role, and that they’ll soon return to their roles as citizens … just like the rest of us.
The other sign of how far we’ve gone from being a republic where the views of the citizens are represented in the government is that while many, many Americans are ashamed of what our government is doing, this in turn has no impact on the actions of any of the leadership of either party.
Susan, has any of the 911 relatives resorted to suicide revenge attacks? No. So give me a break.
Injustice in itself does not necessarily result in destructive outcomes. Some people focus on rebuilding rather than destroying.
What say you about the release of Abu Bakkar in Indonesia? Should Australians resort to suicide attacks in revenge for the Bali injustice?
As moslems continue to experience the backlash for radical Islam in its many forms, including profiling and Guantanamo, they may start retaking their faith and to speak up against radicals. Without that they will continue to play their lazy ambivalent game.
Susan, has any of the 911 relatives resorted to suicide revenge attacks? No. So give me a break.
There was a strong feeling of vengeance associated with the invasion of Iraq.
Not to mention Afghanistan.
Davis, please give everyone a break. Your black and white fixation on radical Islam is tired and boring.
Move on to another cyber-reality, one that is fictional enough for your mindset.
Davis, you love this Dear, this is your follow madness friends…
Video purports to show marine singing about killing civilians
http://archive.turkishpress.com/news.asp?id=128375
Davis goes and sees Dr. Phil….
Ya Salah,
Nevermind habibi. The lovely song about killing a child was just a joke, its writer says now, so that makes it ok. What a good and very funny joke it was, too!
(Of course I am not serious!)
COMtns
Read this shows this criminal lead you for years…
” The minutes of a secret 1975 U.S. National Security Council meeting attended by President Ford, reveal Henry Kissinger grumbling, “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” – Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, by John Prados.”
http://www.watchingamerica.com/thenationpk000024.shtml
It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination (said president Ford)
That problem has been solved, thanks to Israel. They called their assassinations “targeted killings”, and since then there seems to be no problem in executing them. Israel does it all the time, and so do the Americans. For a long time the Western press wouldn’t dare to call Israeli assassinations anything but “targeted killings”, but now the word “assassination” seems to be allowed again. But the meaning of the word seems to have changed somewhat, since Israel introduced its euphemism of “targeted killing”. Very often one hears journalists and others talk about “targeted assassinations”, as if an assassination could be anything but targeted.
menno hert wrote,
For a long time the Western press wouldn’t dare to call Israeli assassinations anything but “targeted killings”
Did any one remember this lady Safia Taleb al-Suhail, and her father story
Her father was a tribal sheik who was shot in 1994 at his front door by Saddam Hussein’s former intelligence agency in Beirut (possibly paid for by “Oil for Food” money!
Do you remember what reactions from the west about the assassination were?
Now they prised his daughter to be in the politic instrument in Iraq.
Did any Palestinians daughters and sons of those targeted and killed by Israelis treated likewise as Safia Taleb al-Suhail? And why?
What are the differences here can any one give us smart answer here.
Sensible people in the US should be frightened by the extreme views with which our “leaders” junk basic human rights. We ordinary people may be next in the cross-hairs of rabid ruthless government power. Can’t happen? If you believe so, that is the key factor to it rally happening.
“Susan, has any of the 911 relatives resorted to suicide revenge attacks? No. So give me a break.” – davis
Not only did I hear 9/11 relatives call for revenge and retribution, so did many non-related NYC folks on national TV during town hall meetings. They were calling on their government to enact revenge. And, the US government obliged.
Now, in weaker countries, the government cannot act against the US military. It would be suicide.
I recommend going to see “Why We Fight” which includes the story of a NYC cop who lost his son in the 9/11 attacks. After the Iraq war started, he asked to have a bomb dedicated to his son’s memory before being dropped in Iraq. And his request was fulfilled. They put his son’s name on the bomb. That is a true story. (Nice that he could extract revenge without leaving his home and risking his own life, no?) And be sure to watch the ending of that movie. I believe you can find that movie on http://www.informationclearinghouse.info website.
Keep in mind that car bombs are the poor man’s airforce.
“Injustice in itself does not necessarily result in destructive outcomes.” – davis
It sure did in the case of the Iraq war and I suspect one day we will conclusively say the same about the Afghanistan war also.