Part 2 of a post on Christopher's criticisms of Amnesty International
Here's what AI is saying about its work with Begg and Cageprisoners:
"There has been a lot of controversy in the media surrounding Amnesty International’s work with Moazzam Begg and Cageprisoners, in light of statements by Gita Sahgal, an Amnesty International staff member.
Contrary to Gita Sahgal’s assertions to the media, she was not suspended from Amnesty International for raising these issues internally. In fact, we actively welcome vigorous internal debate. Up to now we have maintained confidentiality in line with our policy but wanted to correct this misrepresentation. This is not a reflection of the organisation’s respect for her work as a women’s rights activist and does not undermine the work she has done over the last few years as the head of Amnesty International’s gender unit.
Our work with Moazzam Begg has focused exclusively on highlighting the human rights violations committed in Guantánamo Bay and the need for the US government to shut it down and either release or put on trial those who have been held there. Moazzam Begg was one of the first detainees released by the US without charge, and has never been charged with any terrorist-related offence or put on trial.
When President Obama promised to close Guantánamo, Amnesty International hoped that we could wind down our campaign and focus more broadly on human rights abuses related to security and terrorism. However, as that promise remains unmet, Amnesty International continues to work with Moazzam Begg and other former detainees to ask European governments to accommodate those who cannot be returned to their country of citizenship without risk of torture or ill-treatment.
In this complex and polarised world, we at Amnesty International face the challenge of communicating clearly the scope of our work with individuals and groups. Amnesty International champions and continues to champion Moazzam Begg’s rights as a former detainee at Guantánamo. He speaks about his own views and experiences, not Amnesty International’s. And Moazzam Begg has never used a platform he shared with Amnesty to speak against the rights of others.
Amnesty International has a long history of demanding justice – in the case of our Counter Terror with Justice Campaign we called for both an end to human rights abuses at Guantánamo and other locations, and called for those detained there to be brought to justice, in fair trials that respected due process.
However, our work for justice and human rights spans a far wider range of issues than counter-terrorism and security. Amnesty International has done considerable research on the Taleban and campaigns to stop violence against women and to promote women’s equality. We continue to take a strong line against abuses by religiously-based insurgent groups and/or governments imposing religious strictures, Islamic or otherwise, in violation of human rights law. Sometimes the people whose rights we defend may not share each other's views – but they all have human rights, and all human rights are worth defending."
In a by now notorious 2005 column in Slate, Hitchens piled into Amnesty International on account of its opposition to the Bush administration’s treatment of alleged terrorists incarcerated at Guantanamo and elsewhere because he felt AI had moved away from its original stance (“no overt political position was to be taken”) and he objected to the organization’s description of the US detainee camp system as “the gulag of our times”, which most other observers felt was quite a poetic way of putting things. In the course of that screed, he revealed his true feelings about common humanity, fundamental human rights and justice for all. I’ve quoted this before but it bears repeating as one of the all-time most memorable Hitchicisms, right up there with “No child’s behind left!” and “Don’t be such a lesbian!”
"I think it is fairly safe to say that not one detainee in Guantanamo is there because of an expression of opinion."
Safe it may well have been, even though the friends of the Guantánamo detainees are less forgiving than the friends of Mother Teresa, But it was actually very far from the truth. Many of the prisoners sent to Guantánamo were innocent people who were either picked up in the wrong place at the wrong time or else taken away because somebody else expressed the opinion that they were enemy combatants, regardless of whether they were guilty of anything, as was doubtless known by Hitchens at the time. As Andy Worthington, author of The Guántanamo Files, comments.
"There was no process. In all previous wars, the U.S. military has followed the Geneva Conventions, and, in accordance with Article 5 of the Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, has held battlefield tribunals to separate the wheat from the chaff — or the fighters from the farmers. In the first Gulf War, for example, the military held 1,196 battlefield tribunals, and nearly three-quarters of the prisoners were subsequently released.
In Afghanistan, however, not only were there no battlefield tribunals, but Chris Mackey, who worked as a senior interrogator in the prisons at the airbases in Kandahar and Bagram, where the Guantánamo prisoners were processed, noted in his book The Interrogators that every single Arab who ended up in U.S. custody was sent to Guantánamo, on the orders of senior figures in the military and the intelligence services, who received the lists of prisoners at their base in Kuwait."
In weighing up Hitchens’s charges against Amnesty, we should also to bear in mind whether he himself has been anywhere near as assiduous at campaigning for human rights as they have and whether he has been as faithful to his youthful ideals as AI has been. To take the second point first, the record shows Christopher to be no stranger to personal or political treason. Those of us who have followed his career can point to an impressive list of what can fairly be called betrayals of people and things he had once been loyal to, sort of, so it ill becomes him to accuse others of straying from their principles. As for the first point, where was Christopher when George W. Bush and his menagerie of obsequious officials, jaundiced judges and castrated congress critters began mowing down great swaths of the US Constitution and the common law wherever it interfered with their power-grabbing plans? Where was his outcry when they suspended habeas corpus and decided they could ignore the Geneva Conventions? What kind of protest did he make about the show trial of John Walker Lindh — now serving 20 years for being in the Taliban at a time when the Bushies decided to bury them under a carpet of bombs rather than of gold, or of José Padilla — who was held under truly gulag-like conditions that included torture and solitary confinement in a Kafkaesque legal maze for several years before any formal charges were brought against him?
When the Empire was busily dismantling the Republic, we all know where Hitchens was and what he was saying, and anyone who’s interested can read all about it in the pages of Slate. When human rights were being trampled under foot by the most hubristic American government since the one headed by George III, the only prisoner of conscience whose rights I can remember Christopher championing was Irve Lewis Libby.
In a way, the attacks he is making against Amnesty International echo those he made against Mother Teresa, who also ran a goody goody organization that, like AI, that had a few warts but was basically doing good in the world. The torrent of bile on that occasion prompted Alex Cockburn to write, “Between the two of them, my sympathies were with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Calcutta, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup?'" Today our sympathies should be firmly with Amnesty. If you were locked in a filthy dungeon, no sun to light your morning, who do you think would be more likely to lobby your jailers for a double ration of lumpy porridge?
At base, Amnesty International is all about working for amnesty, meaning the alleviation of unjust treatments and punishments including torture and the death penalty, which for humanists are unjust in any circumstances. We may not always agree with how AI operates, who it cooperates with, or on whose behalf it seeks amnesty, but in the interests our common welfare and our common humanity, we should all be giving this plucky little organization our moral if not our material support. And for this reason, Hitchens's call for AI's supporters to withhold their support for AI over a partisan issue is not just shameful, it is truly wicked.
“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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