Back in June, 2005, Christopher Hitchens pulled out all the stops in an effort to sweat out a defense of the Bush administration's conduct of the "War on Terror" in a Slate column intriguingly entitled Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. He contrasted the position of the United States, "a signatory to the Geneva protocols," with that of the forces of al-Qaida and its surrogate organizations, who "are not signatory to the conventions and naturally express contempt for them," and who "are more like pirates, hijackers, or torturers—three categories of people who have in the past been declared outside the protection of any law." Likewise, in the past, witches have been burned at the stake and homosexuals have had hot pokers thrust up where the sun don't shine and people who have said things unpleasing to kings and priests have had their tongues cut out. The past is like a foreign country, for they do things differently there. But I digress. This led him to conclude that:
The administration therefore deserves at least some sympathy in its confrontation with an enemy of a new type. I should very much like to know how a Gore administration would have dealt with the hundreds of foreign sadists taken in arms in Afghanistan. I should also like to know how other Western governments, which are privately relieved that the United States assumed responsibility for the last wave, expect to handle the next wave of fundamentalist violence in their own societies. No word on this as yet.
I felt at the time that this was Hitchsterical hyperbole of the fascist crackpot kind. Not only did "we" take hundreds of sadists prisoner, but they were "foreign" sadists too. Are we to take it that if only they'd been domestic sadists we could have given them all gainful employment in the prison service, the National Guard, or the CIA? But moreover, what proof did we have that the hundreds "we" had taken were all or mostly sadists?
Hitch's main aim in the piece was so rebuke Amnesty International for its characterization of Camp Delta as "the gulag of our times." And to this effect, he accused the organization of failing to adhere to its established rule that "no overt political position was to be taken." The point may well be valid, but Hitch couldn't help pushing further out onto the thin ice of unsubstantiated speculation:
And now look. I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion. (And those whose "opinion" is that all infidels must die are not exactly prisoners of conscience.) Morally neutral on this point, apparently, Amnesty nonetheless finds its voice by describing the prison itself as "the gulag of our times." No need to waste words here: Not everyone in the gulag was a "prisoner of conscience," either. But if an organization that ostensibly protects the rights of prisoners is unaware of the nature of a colossal system of forced labor and arbitrary detention—replete with physical torture, starvation, and brutal execution—then the moral compass has become disordered beyond repair. This is not even neutrality between the fireman and the fire. It surely expresses a covert sympathy with the aims and objectives of jihad and an overt, if witless and sinister, hatred of the United States. If only this were the only symptom of that tendency.
Not everyone imprisoned in the Gulag was tortured either, and not everyone in US care has avoided forced labor, torture, starvation or execution. Certainly the Guantanamo inmates have it warmer than their Siberian equivalents, but without experiencing either the Soviet or the American Gulag system, how is one to judge which offers the better facilities? The likening of one punitive torture camp system to the other did not imply they were equivalent in all major respects, but only that they had many things in common.
Still, to give Hitch due credit, the weaselly boast that "I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion" must have sounded like a defensible point back in 2005. As time went by, however, we learned more than enough about Camp Delta from released prisoners, lawyers, guards and officials to be able to tell the Popinjay that he has another think coming there. One of the most eye-raising accounts of all came as recently as this March, when Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff Lawrence B. Wilkinson wrote on a blog that a full ninety percent of the people imprisoned at Guantanamo were innocent and, moreover, they were known to have been innocent by the US government the whole time.
— [N]o meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation. This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to "just get the bastards to the interrogators".
— [S]everal in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released. But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released.
— The third basically unknown dimension is how hard Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy Richard Armitage labored to ameliorate the GITMO situation from almost day one. For example, Ambassador Pierre Prosper, the U.S. envoy for war crimes issues, was under a barrage of questions and directions almost daily from Powell or Armitage to repatriate every detainee who could be repatriated... Standing resolutely in Ambassador Prosper's path was Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld who would have none of it. Rumsfeld was staunchly backed by the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney. Moreover, the fact that among the detainees was a 13 year-old boy and a man over 90, did not seem to faze either man, initially at least.
So, it's finally out in the open that around 700 of the 775 inmates who were kept trussed and caged under the Cuban sun for upto seven years (as of january 2009, 245 detainees remained) — plus God knows how many thousands more who were rendered into hellholes further east — were neither pirates, hijackers, nor torturers, but were in fact innocent people who were victimized by pirates, hijackers and torturers for nefarious ends. Over the years, Christopher Hitchens has staked his reputation on acting as an apologist for this sordid although far-from-little enterprise, and while he is unlikely ever to stand trial for his part in ruining so many people's lives, his name will always be associated his journalistic efforts in support of, to borrow the words of Dick Cheney, "a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business."
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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