The Pundits of Gitmo

June 12^th, 2006

Note: Since I’ll be writing this somewhat off the cuff, I would like to make clear that there are no actual quotes in this piece. They are paraphrases and characterizations of things people actually said.

There are many guiding principles I like to live by. The one I am reminded of today will be the title for the first section of this essay:

BEWARE OF PUNDITS

When you seek knowledge about the world, there will always—always be people who have objectives. These people will exist on the right and wrong sides of issues, and generally, they will look and smell like reasonable people with reasonable ideas. Beware them—they are liars and scoundrels.

They are not, of course, liars in the traditional sense. Most will rely on facts and site evidence, and the facts and evidence will often be legitimate. The lie, generally, is in ignoring the full scope of the issue…the true meaning of the issue. And very, very often, in order to fool you into doing the same, they will tug at your heartstrings with simplistic, passionate pleas that are irrelevant to the core of what’s at issue.

One thing I believe is that by in large, the more complicated an issue seems, the simpler the core questions are. There are always core questions—points of actual debate you can either be for or against. The rest is fluff. The rest is posturing designed to draw you away from the core issue so you don’t have to confront it…so your mind can be made up on the basis of instinctive and irrelevant passions. The pundits poke you like a sleeping dog until you hate the stick they want you to hate, and they convince you with pretty words that your hatred is reasonable.

If you want to think—if you really, honestly want to be free of bullshit, you have to separate yourself from your passions when you consider an issue. That goes as much for the right-wing Muslim haters as it does the lefty eco-nuts. I have no sympathy for either of you, and I’m sick and tired of listening to pundits make passionate but entirely irrelevant arguments about an issue. And I’m equally sick of people being moved by this crap.

EVEN NPR CAN’T ESCAPE

You hope, you pray, that at least National Public Radio can filter out some of this garbage. You hope that a program with the overwhelming quality of the Diane Rehm Show would be free of such irrelevancies. Yet time and again I am pushed to fury by bullshit, and I just can’t stand to be silent about it anymore.

Today, the show’s topic was about the three suicides at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba, where enemy combatants are being held in deplorable conditions without rights, in violation of the Geneva Convention.

At least if you listen to David Remes, an attorney representing seventeen Yemeni citizens held there. If your name is David Rivkin, another attorney, this one a former Justice Department official under Reagan and the first President Bush, the captives in Gitmo live in luxury, are allowed to practice their faith, provided excellent food and medical care—this shithead literally talked about the food in Gitmo like it was from a first class restaurant. And rights? Rivkin argued strenuously that the captives in Gitmo have more rights and have received more due process than any other POWs in history.

Like a lot of liberals, when I hear something like that, I get pissed off. I personally believe the government is doing an awful lot of bad shit down there. I think guys like Rivkin are apologists. I found myself siding with Mr. Remes, whose arguments appealed to my personal sense of decency. But then, that’s exactly what I was supposed to feel. The point of these kinds of media debates isn’t to change anyone’s mind. It’s simply to make you reaffirm which side of the issue you’re on. They want to make you mad—want to make you hate the guy from the other side, because that keeps you listening.

I say this with all due respect to Diane Rehm. I love the show. It’s one of the most intelligent and bullshit free political talk shows anywhere. But you can’t deny that NPR wants to keep the liberals listening, and you can’t deny—you can’t really deny that nothing substantive of any kind was discussed today.

How can an entire one hour show about Gitmo go buy without someone pointing out the most obvious problem of all: The fact that we still know so little about what’s really, truly going on down there in Cuba. Yeah, we know more than we used to, but: Remes says the conditions are deplorable, Rivkin says it’s far better than most civilian prisons (because they’re so wonderfully humane). So uh…what’s the real story…and why didn’t anyone ask?

What are the conditions like in Gitmo? Why doesn’t anyone know? If we knew for certain they were deplorable then Rivkin wouldn’t have dared to claim they were good. He can claim they’re good because nobody really knows, and nobody can conclusively prove he’s wrong. That’s what I mean about pundits telling lies without telling lies. No self-respecting pundit will ever made a statement that’s known to be false. If this issue is even up for debate, then it means we don’t know. You would think in a one-hour program on the subject, someone might have asked why we don’t know and what if anything can be done about it.

It didn’t come up. Apparently Diane was okay with these two men taking exactly opposite positions on a factual question.

TERRORISTS HAVE RIGHTS?

When I say beware pundits, I mean all of them—including me. I like to think my analysis of these issues is unbiased, and compared to a lot of what’s out there, I think they are—but c’mon—who the hell am I kidding? I’m a passionate person too. That’s why I have a great deal more to say about Mr. Rivkin—the Bush apologist—than Mr. Remes, the squishy liberal. Sure, Remes said plenty of things that set off my bullshit detector, but that Rivkin bastard…

I’m the last person who’ll ever tell you the liberal position on these issues is flawless, but I’ve about had it with right-wing pundits trying to back us into a corner where we look like traitorous wimpy pot-headed hippies who care more about human rights than human survival. I’m tired of enduring the sneering implication that we’re so pussified by our politics that we should just let all the Gitmo people go so we can have a big gay dance around a campfire and sing kumbaya. I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it.

Rivkin thankfully didn’t go to the well on that one very often, but at least two or three times throughout the hour he finished a point by going in that sort of direction. Oh, those stupid liberals just want to let them go out so they can go back to killing us! Like we’re a bunch of friggin’ morons.

And I grant, some people on my side of this debate are morons, but let me just make my stance clear:

The people who are in Gitmo who are guilty of crimes against humanity or against our soldiers on the battlefield should rot in hell. They should stay in prison forever, and they should be treated like the sacks of shit they are.

Okay? Stop it now. We don’t like terrorists. We think terrorists should die. If anyone on my side of this issue thinks captured terrorists should be let go because the US Government is evil and they deserve to be mad at us…or whatever the hell…you are a moron. That’s not the friggin’ issue. If that’s what you’re fighting for than you’re no better than a Limbaugh ditto-head.

The issue is whether or not they are terrorists. The issue is how we, as a nation, are going to deal with enemy combatants in the War on Terror. I’m acknowledging that the Bush Administration is correct on a couple of things here. They’ve claimed that these prisoners aren’t POWs protected under the Geneva Convention because the Convention doesn’t apply. They’re right. The Geneva Convention was designed to deal with soldiers of an opposing army—one like ours, with a government behind it, that wears uniforms. Since terrorists behave more like gangs, or some kind of violent social movement, the old ideas about prisoners of war are irrelevant. They are rightfully classified as enemy combatants…that is to say, something other than POWs.

The real question is this: How do we know they’re enemy combatants? Guys in armies wear uniforms. They fight in pitched battles over pieces of ground, or fly in airplanes or move in armored vehicles between military installations. It’s relatively easy to know the guy you picked up is in fact a solider in the opposing army. According to Remes, a lot of the people in Gitmo weren’t picked up during or after pitched battles. They were ratted out by locals and arrested. That’s entirely different. That’s much more like a police action than a military one. If you catch a terrorist red-handed, setting explosives on a street corner—okay. That guy is a POW. But if some guy told you that some other guy was thinking about making some bombs and might know some other guy who’s associated with a local terrorist group…THAT IS DIFFERENT AND MUST BE TREATED DIFFERENTLY.

And that’s what we’re talking about here. It may not apply to all the Gitmo prisoners but it almost certainly applies to some of them: Their status as terrorists is not obvious. They weren’t caught in the act—they were accused by someone. The cases against them are built out of second-hand information. That is, quite clearly, a very different situation from the one the Geneva Convention was designed to handle.

So you might understand why my head exploded when Rivkin used the Geneva Convention to justify what we’re doing down there:

Question 1: Is it right to hold prisoners indefinitely, without charge or trial?

Answer: Of course. Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners are held until the end of hostilities. Why should this be any different?

Question 2: Are prisoners in Gitmo receiving legitimate due process?

Answer: Nazi prisoners received no due process at all, so the fact that we’re giving these people any opportunity to defend themselves proves just how good a people we are. We’re going above and beyond the call, really.

Now wait a minute—how can you argue the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply and then use it to justify indefinite detentions? At one point, he accused we liberals of essentially whining about indefinite detentions when “Winston Churchill would’ve thrown you out of his office for asking how long they were going to hold the Nazi prisoners, because he didn’t know when the war was going to end.” (Not an actual quote).

Holy hell that’s moronic. Yes, Churchill didn’t know when the war was going to end, but he knew it would end. It was a declared war—the kind where two foes bash each other about until one side wins and the other loses. The War on Terrorism has no relation whatsoever to World War II. They aren’t even remotely alike, and yet I can’t count the times Rivkin referenced that war to justify his arguments. The War on Terror never ends, because there is no nation to defeat. There will be no armistice. It will go on until minds and attitudes are changed. That’s a completely different beast. It is illogical to argue that indefinite detention applies in this situation the same way it has in prior wars. It just doesn’t make sense.

It is similarly moronic to argue that since the prisoners in World War II didn’t get due process, any semblance of due process given to terrorists is going above and beyond the call of duty. First off, if you honestly believe these people should be held until “the end of hostilities,” you should argue they don’t deserve any due process at all. The Nazi’s got none, why should these folks? If you argue that due process makes sense here at all, you’re arguing for the other side. Rivkin says, “Hey, look how many people we’ve released.” As if the fact that we’ve released some people proves that all of them are receiving due process. Even so, you’re admitting that some of the people we’ve picked up aren’t guilty. You’re proving my point, which is that the status of these people is not obvious, and that as such, legitimate due process is required.

At least if you believe that holding innocent people indefinitely is wrong—which is one of those moral issues Rivkin doesn’t want you to think about.

PRODDED WITH THE STICK

Because that’s the stick they’re poking you with. They want you to draw the blind assumption that all of those people are terrorists, and that none of them deserve rights. I’ve seen this too many times. When you hit guys like Rivkin with legitimate counter arguments, they resort to generalizations.

The fact is, we don’t know for certain whether all of the people in Gitmo are terrorists. It’s highly possible that some of these people were picked up because others lied about them—perhaps for the $25,000 in reward money the US was throwing around in Afghanistan—where you make a buck a week. We don’t know anything here for certain, which is saddening, but you can’t just dismiss the possibility that someone might lie in exchange for a life-changing sum of money. You can’t also deny that some people might simply have been picked up by accident.

Rivkin argues that we shouldn’t give enemy combatants the same due process US citizens do because they’re not criminal defendants—they’re terrorists. But that’s not really the point, is it? We don’t simply have due process in this country because of some random thought of the founders. We have it because the truth is not obvious, and because we hold the belief that innocent people should not be punished. In our system, we accept the knowledge that guilty men will go free because we refuse to allow innocent people to be incarcerated (at least theoretically). That’s why in our system, you have a right to face your accusers—in public. You have a right to know the evidence against you and challenge it. Not because we’re Americans. Not because it’s in the Constitution… Because it’s the fairest way we could think of to ensure that the accused are in fact guilty.

As an American citizen, I believe in this system. I believe in the rights of the accused, even though I know those rights assure that from time to time, guilty people will go free—perhaps even threaten us again. I believe in it because it’s right—because it’s moral—because it is one of the cornerstones of freedom.

So here lies the first of several core questions—the real questions that never come up on talk shows…

Do you believe in that system? Do you believe it is morally superior for a society to grant rights to the accused? Do you believe it is right to accept the risk that the guilty will go free in order to prevent the innocent from being punished?

And if you do, how can you not apply that same standard to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay? “They’re not American citizens. They don’t deserve the same rights as us.” No—you’re marginalizing the rights if you take that position. If the rights are morally superior, they’re morally superior all the time, in every situation. If it’s wrong for an innocent American citizen to be sent to jail, it’s equally wrong for an innocent Afghani citizen to be held indefinitely in a prison camp. If you believe those rights are morally correct, but apply only to Americans, you’re a racist.

Sorry, you are.

DON’T WORRY, SO AM I

This will possibly be the weirdest thing I’ve ever said, but there’s no shame in having racist tendencies. Everyone does. Okay, maybe not everyone, but most of us can’t help feeling baseless generalizations about certain groups at certain times. We feel these things instinctively. It’s part of being human. Even when we know these beliefs are flawed, we can’t help but be swayed by them.

Liberals don’t escape this problem. I know it’s illogical to think that George Bush is simply a satanic bastard hell bent on hurting people on a whim. But I can’t help but laugh when he’s characterized that way. I laugh at redneck jokes. I laugh at black jokes. We all do. Let’s not bullshit ourselves about this. We respond instinctively to generalizations about people we know to be false. When we hold accused terrorists to different standards of guilt than we believe are morally right for ourselves, it’s a possibility we have to face.

Unless, of course, you don’t believe our justice system is morally superior. Maybe you believe it’s central premise is flawed—that instead, we should take the risk of jailing innocent people in order to ensure that the guilty are always punished. There are people who believe that, but you rarely hear pundits make that argument. Rivkin did, but briefly and indirectly, when he mentioned that at least twelve of the people we have released have ended up fighting us again. He seemed to be implying that due process is an unacceptable risk.

Yet it’s a risk we accept in our society everyday. It infuriates us. Killers go free and kill again. Child molesters are released for lack of evidence and go on to destroy more young lives. It happens every single day, and we are frustrated by it every single time it happens, but for all our anger, no serious attempt has yet been made to change the system. We believe so profoundly in the value of “innocent until proven guilty” that not even our anger can change our minds on it. And yet we won’t accept this same risk with terrorist prisoners? Why? Because terrorism is somehow worse? Because it’s uglier than regular crime? I don’t know if that’s true and frankly I don’t see how it can possibly be good enough.

These are cases in which the truth is in doubt, and where the innocent may be suffering before our eyes—and we refuse to apply the same moral standard to these people, and the only justification I can think of is racism. They’re not as good as us. They don’t deserve what we do, because they’re inferior human beings. For godsakes, Tim McVeigh got a trial. His guilt was about as obvious as daylight and we still gave him a chance to face his accusers. Are we saying that Tim McVeigh is somehow superior to these Al Queda terrorists? If you ask me, they’re all politically driven nuthead killers, and if one of them gets the shaft on due process it’s because they’re brown, Muslim, and from another country.

Now that’s my perspective, which you can disagree with—but that’s the core issue you have to face: Do accused terrorists deserve the same right to challenge that accusation as we do, and if not, then why not? Because the right is stupid or because “those people” just don’t deserve it?

And those are exactly the heartstrings that Rivkin was tugging at when he characterized the whole lot down there in Cuba as terrorist thugs and killers. Because many people in this country are ready and willing to simply assume all of them are, because they hold the blatantly racist conviction that all people from Middle Eastern countries hate Americans and want to kill us. If they aren’t actually terrorists then they support terrorists. They’re mindless machines driven by a crazy religion. They’re not like us—they’re subhuman. They don’t deserve the freedoms we have.

It’s quite the trick to tug at that little nugget in the back of your head without actually making you face the underlying implications of it, but it’s a trick the practiced pundit has no trouble pulling off. I wish I could say Remes was any better, but he couldn’t help but stab at the suggestion that all of those people are being wrongly held, in deplorable conditions, because… Well, I guess because Bush is the evil subhuman bastard we liberals like to think he is.

STICK WITH THE CORE

Even if the War on Terrorism is illegitimate and stupid—which is another discussion all together—our soldiers have a right to detain the people trying to kill them. But if we’re going to be anything less than racists, we have to apply the same standards to them as we do to anybody else, war or not. It’s not about whether it’s a war or a police action. It’s about whether those people are guilty or not, and the process we use to determine their guilt. So far as I can tell, that system is a flying piece of dung at Gitmo, and it’s about time we set aside our hatreds and really thought about why that is.

That “real thought” was not, sadly, in evidence today on the Diane Rehm show. Instead, for the billionth time I witnessed two pundits making generalizations and assumptions that missed the point entirely. Now listen, folks—democracy is only as good as we make it. We deserve better than to be subjected to this crap. If we’re going to disagree, let’s disagree over the real issues—not our assumptions, generalizations, and petty hatreds. We’ve gotta be better than that.

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