The dust appears to be settling on Guantánamo Bay; by presidential decree, it will be closed within a year. The last British detainee, Binyam Mohamed, was released on 23rd February. The Guantánamo experiment was, say its critics, a comprehensive failure. But this depends on what it was trying to achieve. The strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of its existence will last much longer than the camp itself.
"Guantánamo" has become a byword for all that is wrong with America's war on terror. At first glance, it appears to have been a legal failure too. Its architects' cynical reinvention of (and disregard for) the law has been widely documented. David Bowker, a lawyer in the department of state's office of the legal adviser, reported how he and colleagues were asked to "find the legal equivalent of outer space" where detainees would have no legal rights. But in June 2006, the US supreme court ruled that its inmates were entitled to protection under the Geneva convention—despite the administration's attempts to establish the contrary.
Guantánamo's guiding philosophy—that being of the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time can make you eligible for inhumane treatment—has also been widely denounced as a moral failure. Binyam Mohamed is a case in point: a 30-year-old cleaner accused of making a nuclear bomb, he was held at Guantánamo for 54 months and tortured. Towards the end of his incarceration there was speculation he was being held purely to conceal the torture he had suffered. "You will be punished," Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnameable, "for having been punished."
But these are "failures" only if we take the aim of Guantánamo Bay to be the administration of justice and the gathering of intelligence. Clearly it fails in both these regards—but we must ask ourselves its creators had other strategic gains in mind.
Guantánamo has been a tactical success is that it has acted as a smokescreen for other, darker, US practices. When the first pictures of the camp were released in January 2002, the world was shocked by the images of shackled, stumbling detainees in their orange jumpsuits and black hoods. The US government's response was equally startling: "To be in an eight-by-eight cell in beautiful sunny Guantánamo Bay… is not inhumane treatment," Donald Rumsfeld declared. "What's going on down there is responsible, humane, legal, proper." This may have seemed like just another example of Bush administration slack-jawed optimism, but what Rumsfeld would surely have known was that there were far worse things happening at other detention sites in Bagram, Kandahar, Kabul and Abu Ghraib.
"There is a whole process one has to get through to get to Guantánamo Bay," confirms Moazzam Begg, a British ex-detainee. "Bagram was so terrible I was looking forward to Guantánamo Bay, even though I knew what it was." As the focus of the world's outrage, Guantánamo has proved a useful distraction. Worryingly, the Obama administration has not taken steps to disown these other sites; while Guantánamo acts as a lightning rod for international attention, there is no pressure on the US to modify its position anywhere else.
Guantánamo has also put the legality of torture on the agenda. The activities at the camp were notoriously given legal sanction by US Attorney General Alberto R Gonzales, first by the introduction of categories in the definition of "enemy combatants," then by a revision of the definition of "torture." But even if these moves were contested, the very fact that the concepts were treated as a matter for debate and speculation undermines the absolute prohibition of torture in the third and fourth Geneva conventions. In the war on terror, who counts as a "person"? What counts as "torture"? No one should be subject to inhumane treatment—but who can be subject to nearly inhumane treatment, or not-quite-inhumane treatment? These questions are absurd—or should be. That they are now seen as legitimate is Guantanamo's strategic success.
But the greatest strategic victory won is in the field of ethics. In his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), the philosopher Richard Rorty argued that the point of ethical discussion is to sensitise us to the suffering of others, and he uses Nabokov's Humbert Humbert to show us that complicity with a cruelty teaches us how to be cruel. Guantánamo accustomed us to cruelty, changing our boundaries of what is conceivable. Now, we are beginning to see mini-Guantánamos spawned by regimes eager to ingratiate themselves with the US. "We don't want to be the world's jailer," said Charles Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs. "We want other countries to step up and accept responsibilities for detainees during this time of war." And so in Ethiopia the notorious Kality prison is used as a destination for secret renditions of "terror suspects" and dissident journalists alike, and in Britain Belmarsh detention centre and use of Orwellian legal instruments like control orders are not widely considered problematic because they are "not as bad as Guantánamo."
Of course, the closure of Guantánamo is undoubtedly a good thing. But if we let ourselves believe that this marks the end of a dark period of history, we have vastly misunderstood the full extent of what is at stake.
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