I don't mean to put a fine point on it, but even Cole doesn't quite seem to grasp what's going on here. These are not prisoners of war. There is no enemy army, there is no enemy government. This isn't about punishment since there are no crimes. There isn't even a public list of names. What would names mean anyway?
[...]
People who are in prison are not interrogated. Whatever crime a prisoner has done is already known and theoretically proved and they are sent to prison as punishment. But that is not what's going on at Abu Ghraib. There are no crimes. There was no trial, there were no charges. It isn't a jail. It is an interrogation center. In other words it is a torture center.
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Yes, I understand your meaning now.
The whole purpose of the concentration facilities the Americans have either created from scratch, such as Guantanamo, or re-assigned from an earlier use like Abu Ghraib is to 'gather intelligence', to interrogate.
So of course due process is meaningless.
I hadn't thought of this before but it explains subtext of the administration's arguments against extending constitutional protections to people described as "enemy combatants" -- they aren't, in most cases, being punished for any crime, there are no charges, there is no evidence. There's only the suspicion of complicity (mental or physical) the idea that 'they know something' and 'we' need to know what they know so they must be detained -- forever if necessary (and of course, it's necessary).
Everyone's guilty; isn't this what the totalitarian imagination assumes?
I'm remembering now an incident from my childhood in West Philly. There was one particularly bad summer during which a small cadre of hood-rats launched upon a mini-crime spree of gunpoint muggings, house break-ins and general small-scale gangsterism. There were probably no more than five young men involved.
Eveyone knew who these boys were and informed the police. The cops, instead of simply apprehending the criminals, started a campaign of total harassment of all the boys in the neighborhood. I was twelve and got rousted for riding my bike at the wrong moment in front of the wrong disgruntled cop.
At the time, because I had a twelve year-old's faith in human reason, I wondered why the cops were bothering everyone instead of simply going after the guys we all knew were responsible. Later, I learned that in the eyes of the police, we were all criminals -- the youngest simply waiting to hatch from our innocence cocoons to begin our proper career as violent criminals. Everyone was guilty, even a big-eyed 12 year-old boy riding home on his bike to read some Asimov.
Now, through the "War on Terror", the Department of Homeland Security, Gitmo and the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq this mindset has been taken from the streets of the 'inner city' (what's the outer city?) and internationalized.
Not only that, the list of existentially guilty persons includes other brown skinned people (such as Arabs and Indians) and also white people who don't talk, act or present themselves in an 'acceptable' way.
Virtually the entire world is now seen as the ghetto America's 'thin blue line' must police lest darkness fall.
It all fits into a psychotically logical pattern. Do you remember how American military personnel described Fallujah when the seige began? They called it a "bad neighborhood". This really struck me because, as a guy who grew up in one of these supposedly "bad neigborhoods" who, through schooling and expanding social connections got to meet people from "good neighborhoods" I know how Americans tended to believe people in a given place to be either entirely trustworthy or irredemiably dangerous.
And if everyone in a given spot is dangerous, you're justified in using ultra-violence against them. Which is why suburbanites often excuse instances of police overkill in "bad neighborhoods" as being understandable ('how could they know who was good or bad?').
.d.