Obama promised to close down Guantánamo Bay Internment Camp 1 upon being elected President back in 2009. He neglected to mention that this could only be possible because a new strategy was being ever more strongly endorsed and carried out, a strategy that no longer needed a prison camp.
In the wake of the failed capture-torture policy of the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles with their next to useless ‘intelligence gathering’ (the primary justification given for the torture parts, along with denials that some techniques used were even torture, prominently water-boarding), Guantánamo Bay has been exchanged for Predators and Reapers. 2 They are already being partnered with smaller, cheaper, handheld/ launched, yet more effective killing machines; watch out for such wonderfully named systems such as ‘Terminator’, ‘Hero’, ‘Switchblade’ and ‘BattleHawk’ at a targeted killing zone near you soon! ‘Swarm troopers’ will do the Empire’s bidding soon enough. 3 If you can’t get reliable ‘intel’ what’s the point of detention and torture? After all, no one is getting intimidated only angrier? It is a plain waste of time and money let alone the risk to soldiers who come face to face with death when doing the capturing part. By the way, ‘the risk to soldiers’ is precisely because the blood of our soldiers is a political cost, not a human one; it ain’t really about the people concerned but about the electorate back at home. After the initial patriotic foolishness, body bags carry opinion changing materials so must be controlled as much as possible.
Prisoners in Guantánamo have never had genuine opportunities for legal defence mainly because the cases against them would not stand up to legal let alone ethical scrutiny. This is abundantly clear despite State and Military denials. 4 From this precedent it is then a short step to the hangman’s noose in the shape of drones and ‘targeted killings.’ 5 You will find many a book now published in a burgeoning market about drones and the ethics of remote killing, but regardless of how close they get to direct hits on the issues around legalities and niceties, the reality is that the State via both the CIA and the Military have been carrying out a relentless campaign of murder via the use of drones – and not just the flying type, though that is the iconic apparatus they want you to have solely in mind, distraction allows other modes to remain more secure in both their development and application. For the rest of us we need to remember the horizon spreads both ways, we should keep our eyes on all of it.
The policy has changed from a ‘capture’ to a ‘kill’ policy, not that one didn’t exist before, but with barely an intake of breath it just remains for us to listen to the usual substandard legal and philosophical spiel to be shat out in our faces to justify the murderous campaign that just seems to get upped every time there is a new Democrat in town. 6 We kind of expect ‘right wingers’ to be supportive of these types of radical and cold manoeuvres, but the ‘liberals’ in America are barely a whisker behind. In the final analysis, there seems to be little in the way of political or ideological difference between American Republican and Democrats at the end of the foreign policy day. 7 it comes down to the trigger men 8 simply being American politicians, bound by the same structures of government as each other. Just so you know and so you don’t get your hopes up, voting won’t help, the change has to be a change to the system, not the people in charge, the asylum has overtaken the lunatics. 9
I suppose in the reason we haven’t seen the closure of Guantánamo to date is less the actual legal and political wrangling claimed by the incumbent administration – there are executive orders after all, 10 but because Obama is still just too busy every single week signing drone based kill lists and death warrants in the ‘national interest.’
Don’t you just love those Nobel Peace prize winners?
Notes:
- Against the grain I choose the description of ‘internment’ rather than the usual ‘detention’ as it is a far more accurate ascription – large groups of people being held without trial ↩
- The two most avaricious of the flying drone platforms ↩
- The term ‘Swarm Troopers’ is borrowed from David Hambling’s recommended book ‘Swarm Troopers: How Small Drones will Conquer the World‘ ↩
- See the works of Clive Stafford Smith, especially ‘The Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Fighting the Lawless World of Guantánamo Bay’ and Asim Qureshi’s important ‘Rules of the Game: Detention, Deportation, Disappearance‘ ↩
- Look out for more on this in future ‘War Wounds’ entries ↩
- For a timeline on U.S. assassination policy see Professor Gordon L. Bowen at http://www.globalresearch.ca/targeted-killings-timeline-of-u-s-policy-concerning-covert-operations-involving-assassination/5326095 another good and clear attempt is that by Uri Friedman at http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/08/13/targeted-killings-a-short-history/ ↩
- See the excellent work by the historian Richard Hofstadter in ‘The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It’ ↩
- Whilst they are and have always been men there is no reason in the world to suppose a woman would be any different ↩
- I am picking on the Americans a little, but that is because they are the only world Empire right now so I don’t see the ‘picking’ as unfair. To note, the Israeli’s have been at the forefront in the history of the application of targeted killings, drones and arguments support the whole cabal. It doesn’t mean there aren’t Israeli’s equally aware and opposing such strategies with important work of course. Further, my own homeland Britain is also intimately involved; regrettably, it may be that most Western style States are too, war is still given precedence over ‘their’ lives and debating and compromising don’t always get what you want ↩
- Obama’s two relevant Executive Orders (13492 & 13493) have merely instructed reviews and the identification of alternative internment facilities; to be fair the reference to closure is clear but frankly seems incidental given there is has been no follow through in over seven years ↩
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