Guantanamo Fables

I've never blogged about the Guantanamo detention camp. It's not my topic, not something I know much about, and believe it or not, it's not even a matter I have much of an opinion on one way or the other. For many millions of people however, many of them with no more information or connection than mine, it was an article of faith, yea, even a central dogma, that Gitmo is a Very Very Bad Thing, and a Colossal Crime of the Bush Administration.

Well, apparently the facts are less conclusive. According to the New York Times

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it...

One Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved in challenging the White House plan to close the prison, argued that the report showed that the Bush administration had created a humane detention camp. Speaking of the remaining detainees, this official said the report showed that if the men were moved, they might “go from a humane environment to a less humane environment.”

Of course, the guardians of the dogmas aren't going to take any of this lying down. True, they have yet to read the report, but they don't need to, since dogmas and articles of faith by definition are impervious to factual investigation; they function in other spheres.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that she and other lawyers found that conditions have remained bleak since the start of the new administration.

Ms. Gutierrez said that a report by the rights center, to be released next week, asserts that two major Guantánamo prison buildings, known as Camp 5 and Camp 6, should be closed immediately. She said prisoners there continue to be held in isolation for as long as 24 hours a day, that psychological difficulties are treated as disciplinary infractions, and that many cells are windowless.

“This is really running the risk that the review is just a big whitewash,” Ms. Gutierrez added, “and we expect more of the new administration.”

One reason I'm a historian by preference, even while presently trying to make a living as something else, is that history is so perpetually interesting. Look where we are right now, for example. Twenty years after Francis Fukuyama rather prematurely declared that rational thought and liberal democracy had ended history, we've got a virulent strand of Islam warring with mankind, a resurgent Czarist Russia, a non-democratic China just beginning to flex its muscles on the international scene in blithe disregard of the the entire political agenda of humanism, and significant sections of the liberal West, the parts that regard themselves as its elite, are abandoning their glorious but hard-fought for heritage in favor of a set of religious-beliefs-sans-God that takes the silliest part of religion and the silliest part of secularism while abandoning all the serious parts of both. What's to be bored by?