It is the quite astonishing, perhaps even wilful ignorance, of so many that perpetuates the conflict.
Andy Worthington, a journalist who has worked exhaustively on documenting the incarceration without trial of the Guantanamo detainees, published an article in the Guardian on September 11th entitled Remember 9/11, remember Guantánamo. The article is one of the Comment is Free section, to which readers can respond in brief postings. Worthington respectfully reminds readers of the status of the Gitmo prisoners; and yet, despite the mountains of documentation stating that most detainees were not picked up on the battlefield but were sold to the US for bounty, despite the well documented fact that the guilt or innocence of the detainees has never been established owing to the absence of a genuine judicial process, despite the use of torture for extracting evidence, despite the fact that some detainees were children when incarcerated and others were in their 70s, despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the detainees had nothing whatsoever to do with any acts of terrorism, despite despite despite…
Despite more reliable information to support the view that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has been a disaster from start to finish.
Despite so much, some people are still gullible (or stupid) enough to wheel out discredited and outdated hectoring nonsense in the comments section of the Guardian articles:
somehow, even though i know that they are held “illegally” and what not, i cannot bring myself to fell [sic] any real sympathy for any of the human effluence contained within Guantanamo.
The prisoners at Gitmo were imprisoned as enemy combatants, so are not sweet little boys.
these men aren’t criminals. They weren’t arrested robbing a convenience store. They are soldiers picked up on the battlefield. […] When someone is arrested under normal circumstances for a “crime” there is a “crime scene” and “evidence” that the police comb through and later present at trial.
[this by the same poster who continues]:
And anyway, i thought obama was closing guantonomo [sic]. What happened to that?
9/11 was a declaration of war. Guantanmo [sic] is in effect a prisoner of war camp. Get the terrorists and mass murders to declare peace and stick to it and there would be no need for the place.
The crowning line, though, has to be:
Who cares about 225 Muslim dudes in Gitmo when 3000 died in NYC ?”
All of the above are postings following the one article on Friday.
My feeling is that such hateful views can not be brushed aside as simple lack of information. Reliable accounts of the absence of the rule of law in Gitmo are regularly reported in all the British broadsheets, are regularly documented on BBC and Channel 4 news, in TV documentaries, in articles in all manner of journals, etc. To stick to the view that simply because they are in Gitmo they are guilty is a consciously chosen position, and is a view that helps to perpetuate the crisis. Neither are these postings unusual. Last autumn I marched in the Uni Amnesty International group through the uni and down into town wearing the orange Gitmo jumpsuits, in protest at the British government’s reticence over Gitmo. One aggressive man in town said ‘they’re the fuckers who bombed the Tube, I hope they rot in prison – you can fuck off with your petition.’
That’s the whole point. Not only have they not been convicted, but the overwhelming evidence suggests that of the 754 men (another source claims 779) who have been incarcerated in Gitmo, only a small handful in reality had ever had anything to do with terrorism. However, even the truly ‘bad men’ should be brought to justice through the tried and established means of a criminal court. As habeas lawyer Mahvish Khan explains: ‘I continue to believe that terrorists should receive public trials before they’re locked up. Hiding them away from the world at Gitmo, or anywhere else, without charging them was shady and wrong. It made America look like a lawless thug state and tarnished our nation’s image as a beacon of justic in the world’ (My Guantanamo Diary: 229).
To cling to the crass belief that simply because they are incarcerated they are guilty is a deliberate and highly injurious position.