Two Political Columns

 

REMEMBER THE GUANTANAMO 660

  • In its treatment of its prisoners in Cuba, the U.S. is behaving like a rogue nation


    by Ed Weathers

    (This article originally appeared on The Memphis Flyer web site in August, 2003)



    You spend your days in a wire-mesh cell that’s eight feet long and six feet eight inches wide--about the size of a walk-in closet--yet you’ve never been convicted of a crime. You’ve never had a hearing, or stood before a judge, or been in a courtroom of any kind--yet here you are. Your toilet is a hole in the ground in your cell. Your guards keep the lights on 24 hours a day, and there is no air-conditioning, even in the summer heat of this tropical place. You sweat profusely and sleep fitfully under the lights. For exercise, you get to trudge up and down a narrow caged concrete slab in your shackles for 30 minutes three times a week. You’ve been here for almost two years now, and in that time you haven’t seen or spoken to a single member of your family or talked with a lawyer. You are not allowed news from the outside world; you knew nothing about the war in Iraq, for instance, until your guards told you the U.S. had won.

    Periodically you are pulled from your cell and interrogated. If you tell the questioners what they want to know--which is much more than your name and serial number--you might get a stick of chewing gum or the privilege of playing checkers with another inmate. Last week, one of your fellow prisoners tried to hang himself; at least twenty other inmates have tried to commit suicide that you know of. Three of your fellow prisoners are children under the age of 16. One was 13 years old when he was brought here. No one tells you how long you will be here, and that’s the real horror. If you knew the truth, you too might try to hang yourself, for the truth is this: You might be here forever.

    This is life for most of the 660 prisoners being held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Most of the prisoners were captured in Afghanistan in the war against the Taliban after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The Bush administration has declared these prisoners “unlawful combatants,” claiming that they were not real soldiers and are therefore not protected by the Geneva Convention protocols protecting ordinary prisoners of war. Since the prisoners are being held at Guantanamo, says the Bush administration, they also have no protections under the U.S. judicial system, which apply only to those held on U.S. territory. The Bush administration says it will try the prisoners whenever it feels like doing so (if it tries them at all) in military courts whose judges will be named by the Bush Pentagon. If they are tried, the prisoners will be represented by military counsel also chosen by the Bush Pentagon. They will have no right of appeal to any court not determined by the White House. Some of them could be sentenced to die.

    For these 660 prisoners, George W. Bush has made himself God. He has, for all practical purposes, given himself the right to imprison, judge and execute whomever he wishes, without independent judicial review and in defiance of international law, all in the name of his self-declared “war on terrorism.” Guantanamo is Bush’s little self-created world, where law and human rights mean nothing, where George’s word is considered to come from the burning Bush.

    On October 10, the International Red Cross, an organization which almost never speaks out publicly on political subjects, issued a press release condemning the U.S. for its treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo. “The main concern today after more than 18 months in captivity is that essentially the internees in Guantanamo have been placed beyond the law,” said a Red Cross spokeswoman. “They have no idea about their fate after 18 months. And they have no legal recourse.”

    Others have likewise taken up the cause of the Guantanamo 660. On October 9, nineteen former U.S. diplomats, including former assistant secretaries of state William Rogers and Alexander Watson, and former assistant secretary of defense Allen Holmes, filed a brief with the Supreme Court demanding that the court intervene to protect the rights of the prisoners at Guantanamo and to force the Bush administration to treat them according to accepted standards of U.S. and international law, either providing them with swift, fair and open trials or treating them as POWs according to the Geneva Conventions. Among those condemning the treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo are three former U.S. POWs and a retired Navy judge advocate general, Rear Admiral Donald Guter. The POWs and the admiral point out that with its failure to provide due process or judicial review for the prisoners at Guantanamo, the Bush administration is encouraging other nations to treat prisoners the same way. “My concern is fairly selfish,” says Guter. “If we don’t preserve the rule of law, what happens when our own people are taken captive?”

    Other organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have pointed out that in fact the Fourth Geneva Convention does apply even to those nontraditional soldiers the Bush administration calls “unlawful combatants” (a phrase which does not appear in the Geneva Conventions). Nearly all international legal organizations have declared that any of the detainees who fought as representatives of the Taliban must in fact be treated as POWs. Furthermore, say most legal observers, the notion that Guantanamo is not “U.S.-controlled territory” is at best disingenuous. The alternative is that the base belongs to the Cuban government, from which the U.S. leases the base. But the Bush administration denies Cuban sovereignty there. Acknowledging Guantanamo as Cuba’s would mean the detainees could then petition the Cuban government for treatment under its laws. In other words, Bush and friends are trying to have it both ways with respect to Guantanamo: it’s not Cuba’s if it means giving the prisoners rights under Cuban law, but it’s not ours if it means having to treat the prisoners there under U.S. judicial guidelines.

    George Bush has declared the prisoners at Guantanamo “the worst of the worst” in the war on terrorism. How this determination was made in the heat of battle in Afghanistan is more than problematic. When a 13-year-old is declared “the worst of the worst,” one wonders if the phrase has any meaning at all, or if it just Bush abusing the language as he is wont to do. No doubt some of the Guantanamo 660 are members of Al Qaeda or other organizations that would do harm to the United States. But that doesn’t mean the Bush administration can treat them any way it wishes. Even British Prime Minister Tony Blair, one of Bush’s few buddies on the international scene, demanded last week that Bush give the Guantanamo detainees--especially those who are British citizens--a fair trial soon. Blair spoke out under pressure; the British public, like most of the rest of the free world, is outraged at what Bush is doing in Guantanamo.

    Simply put, international law does not permit a nation to detain anyone indefinitely without charges or access to counsel. In its treatment of the Guantanamo 660, the United States is behaving like a rogue nation.

    And apparently it plans to continue doing so. The U.S. is now building a new “Camp Five” to house the inmates at Guantanamo. According to The Miami Herald, Camp Five, like the rest of the Guantanamo prison expansion, is being built by Kellogg Brown & Root, which so far has been granted $69 million in government contracts without any competitive bidding. Kellogg Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, Vice-President Dick Cheney’s former company and a big contributor to Republican campaigns. Camp Five will be made of concrete, not wire mesh. When it is finished, it will have all the feel of a permanent place, like a tomb.

    END
 
 

AS LONG AS WE BOTH SHALL LOVE

I

The institution of marriage is under attack? That’s fine with me.

(This column was written for The Memphis Flyer on June 6, 2003)

by Ed Weathers

 

I live with a woman who is not my wife. Her name is Gail. We share the same bed, and occasionally we make love to each other. We have been doing this for 17 years. At least once a week, Gail and I look at each other, shake our heads, reach out to hold hands, smile and say how lucky we are to be living such a pleasant life. Honestly. We do. You can ask her.

People use different terms for the way Gail and I live: cohabitation, living in sin, fornication. I call it simply "living together," because that’s what it is, and the phrase has a kind of understated poetry: We live, and we get to do it together. According to the 2000 census, there are about 11 million other Americans living together as we do. The Census Bureau says we are "Persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters"--POSSLQs, for short. But POSSLQ doesn’t quite capture the poetry of it.

Last week, for the five hundredth time, a friend asked me, good-naturedly, "When are you two finally going to get married?"

I gave him the answer I always give to that question: "Never."

Sometimes I’m asked the question differently: "So why don’t you two get married?"

Again I always answer the same way: "Why should we? There’s absolutely nothing marriage can add to our life together that would make it any better."

I was married once, for six years, long ago, to a good woman who was a fine wife and a wonderful mother to our son. The marriage license did nothing to change the fact that we were not right for each other. It did nothing but keep us together longer than we should have stayed together and make us a little unhappier for longer than we should have been. We were, for each other, clothing we had both outgrown, and the law did everything in its power to keep us buttoned tight and strangling.

It’s popular in some circles (you know which circles they are) to say that today the "sacred institution" of marriage is under attack or threatened--by Hollywood movies, by rap lyrics, by the gay rights movement. In fact, next week, on June 12 (in this month of weddings), the Family Research Council--a group that is deeply in love with the institution of marriage--is giving a lecture called "Marriage on Trial" in Washington, D.C. Among the questions they plan to address is this: Does the federal government have a role in rebuilding a "culture of marriage"? Presumably, their answer is a loud YES! The lecture will be given in the Dirksen Office Building of the U.S. Senate. Their object is to lobby senators and congressmen to pass legislation which rewards people who get married--in other words, to promote the institution of marriage and protect it from the cultural forces which are supposedly attacking it. They will get much support from the Bush administration.

I wish I could be there to offer a counterpoint. Personally, I think that if marriage is under attack, that’s a good thing. If the institution of marriage were ended tomorrow, I think the world would be a happier place. ("Marriage is an institution," goes the old joke, "and I’m not ready to be institutionalized yet.") If we keep the institution, I think people should have to live together for years and pass all kinds of written and psychological tests before they are allowed to get married, and I think divorce should be easy. This sounds very Counterculture Sixties, I know, but on this issue I think the Counterculture was right.

For centuries, of course, marriage laws were a way for the church or the state to control the distribution and accumulation of wealth and land, and to keep the powerful in power. To protect his family legacy, a father made sure that his son married a woman of equal or greater property value, preferably a woman who came with many fields and farms, plus a castle or two; legally joining the wealth of two powerful families helped keep them both powerful. To protect the elite in other ways, certain castes were not allowed to marry other castes, lest they pollute the upper classes; and certain colors were not allowed to marry other colors, lest they dilute the color scheme that kept the dominant color dominant; and certain creeds could only marry within their own creed, lest the church lose its force. Marriage, in other words, was a way to legally assure that like bred with like, so the status quo could be maintained.

Marriage was also a way to institutionalize the repression of women and to protect the power of men; once married, a wife was legally subject to her husband, and all she owned became his--but not vice versa. Conversely, marriage was the only way for women to acquire, in exchange for sex and child-bearing, the small measure of economic security legally required of their husbands. And marriage in America has always been a way for the Puritan power structure to suppress the fun of sex. In fact, for nearly all of its history, marriage has had almost nothing to do with love and everything to do with power and control.

Are things different today? Not much, despite the propaganda to the contrary. But I’ll grant that more men and women than ever before now marry "for love." Marriage, they say, is a way to demonstrate their lifelong commitment to each other. What I don’t understand is this: What kind of commitment is it that requires a license, a wedding cake, and a thousand laws to ratify it?

I can honestly say that I don’t comprehend why marriage is so "sacred" to the general population, unless it’s to sustain the economic voltage of those publishing powerhouses, the bridal magazines. There is no need for marriage anymore, if there ever was a need for it. Making sure that fathers provide for the children they sire used to be a respectable reason to encourage people to marry when they had kids, I suppose. But it’s easy enough to put laws on the books that require fathers to support their children, even if the kids are born outside of marriage, and in fact such laws already exist.

The problem is, love may die, but the law lives on. It’s hard to tell in many marriages where love ends and the law begins. Marriages are not made in heaven, they’re made in licensing offices. They’re not blessed by God, they’re blessed by bureaucrats. There is love in many marriages, but it is love under the umbrella of the law, where the wind and rain and sun that both test and nourish other relationships can’t reach until it’s too late. In many marriages, a single strong gust--a fight over money, a lustful glance at someone else--can blow such a relationship away, because its roots are too shallow, having been sheltered too long by the law.

It’s not just that marriage is unnecessary, I believe, it’s that it’s actually harmful. It replaces choice with compulsion. It makes that which should be voluntary, compulsory. If I am faithful to my partner because I am legally bound to be faithful, that is no more emotionally meaningful than stopping at red lights. If I live in the same house as my partner only because the law makes it massively inconvenient for me not to, we are no longer living together, we are simply moving toward death together. If statutes are the only thing driving me to provide for my children, then I am a father by statute only. Marriage replaces affection with the law.

But love does not flourish under the sheriff’s gun. If I were to marry the person I care for, and the weight of the government can be felt behind my every act of caring, how do I then prove my personal commitment to my spouse? In marriage, every caress becomes an act of public will, not purely personal affection. In marriage, every hug can be seen as a hug of convenience, every kiss a kiss from a court of law. The marriage bonds get all tangled up with the simplest ties of affection.

Things are clearer for Gail and me, and for others who live together. We know why we’re there on Sunday afternoon, reading the paper on the sofa, looking at each other occasionally and smiling. It has nothing to do with covenants and courts. We’re there because we like each other best. And we’ll be there as long as we both shall love.

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For more on this subject, check out the web site www.unmarried.org.