Occupations Abroad Always Lead to the Erosion of Liberties at Home
Guantánamo has exposed the Bush regime's disdain for human rights. But there's nothing uniquely American about this
- Gary Younge
- The Guardian,
- Monday June 23, 2008
Before his show trial in Hungary in 1948, Robert Vogeler spent three months in a cell sleeping on a board that hovered just above two inches of water. Day and night a bright light bathed his cell, and even then someone would bang on the wall next door just to make sure he couldn't get any sleep. "It is just a question of time before you confess," he said afterwards. "With some it takes a little longer than others, but nobody can resist that treatment indefinitely."
And so Vogeler, who was arrested for spying, buckled under the pressure and played his role in the gruesome farce of Stalin's postwar purges in eastern Europe. "To judge from the way our scripts were written," wrote Vogeler shortly after his forced confession, "it was more important to establish our allegorical identities than to establish our 'guilt'. Each of us in his testimony was obliged to 'unmask' himself for the benefit of the [Soviet-led] press and radio."
A similar script, it has long been clear, has been written at Guantánamo Bay, although this time the lines were for the prosecution rather than the defence. The point of these detentions has never been to see justice done, but rather to provide a teachable moment about the lengths and depths the American state would go to pursue its perceived interests in the war on terror. It was to find a place in which America could operate above and beyond not only international law but its own - a display of unfettered power not merely indifferent to, but openly contemptuous of, global and local norms.
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