A friend and former student is among those who is deeply troubled by what he sees as human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay. He forwarded me a series of articles from which he draws the conclusion that Gitmo is comparable in its treatment of detainees to the Soviet Gulag. I suggested to him that he read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. He replied with an excerpt from Gulag that recounts some of the psychological methods employed by Soviet interrogators in the Lubyanka and Lefortovo prisons under Stalin and argued that their similarity to what went on in Gitmo puts them on the same moral plane.
Here is my reply to that followed by my friend's rejoinder:
R,
Thanks for the article you recommended (http://reasonablereflection.net/meadesmaxim/99/), but I'm afraid I don't see how the excerpt from the Gulag Archipelago supports the point you wish to make which is that American detention camps are comparable to the Soviet Gulag of the thirties and forties.
In the excerpt, Solzenhitsyn details methods that interrogators employed against Soviet prisoners. They are evil, to be sure, but their heinousness lies (for the most part) not in what was done but rather in to whom it was done and why it was done. The victims of these interrogations were innocent clergy, ordinary believers, dissidents, and anyone else that Stalin deemed insufficiently eager to embrace his regime. Everyone, including the interrogators, knew these people were innocent of any real crime. They were subjected to being "cursed at" etc. because the interrogators were required to get "confessions" out of them to save appearances and therefore had to break their will to resist. What was done to them was wicked primarily insofar as the victims were innocent and the rationale was so unjust.
The detainees at Gitmo, on the other hand, were believed to have information that could prevent acts of murder of innocent people. It's hard to overstate the moral difference this makes. To the extent that the detainees had females "invade their space" or were deprived of sleep in order to get them to divulge this information, these treatments were of a different moral level altogether than similar tactics used at Lefortovo and Lubyanka. In Moscow these tactics were employed against simple peasants. At Gitmo these tactics were employed against mass murderers.
Have there been times at Gitmo when interrogations crossed the line? Possibly, but every allegation of such behavior is investigated and when appropriate the offenders are disciplined. How often do you think that happened in the Gulag of Solzhenitsyn's experience? Even if there have been some incidents of abuse, there are no doubt similar incidences in every prison in the United States. Is the entire American prison system comparable to the Soviet Gulag?
Remember, in the real Gulag prisoners subsisted on a daily diet of one piece of moldy bread and a bowl of watery gruel. The bread often had maggots and beetles in it for which the prisoners gave thanks since the bugs enabled them to get a few more traces of protein into their system. There were scarcely enough calories in this diet to keep people alive and so millions died horrible deaths from starvation and disease. Millions more were permanently damaged, physically and psychologically by their suffering. The survivors emerged from their hell emaciated wrecks.
In the real Gulag the prisoners worked every day digging at frozen soil with nothing on their bodies to defend against the cold except for a few tattered rags. Frostbite and gangrene were common. They couldn't sleep because they couldn't get warm on the freezing cement floors of their cells. They lived in squalor and constant numbness and hunger. If they hesitated or staggered under their load of pain and suffering they were often beaten by their guards for sport.
In Gitmo, by contrast, the prisoners eat better and live more comfortably than do our soldiers in the field. They have menus that include glazed chicken and rice pilaf. The diet is tailored to Islamic requirements. The average detainee has gained 10 to 15 lbs. since his internment.
The prisoners are clothed and shod. Laundry is done for them. They're called to prayer five times a day. Religious accoutrements like prayer rugs, beads, and Korans are provided by American taxpayers and delivered with gloved hands in deference to the Muslims' belief that their captors are "unclean."
Doctors are on hand to address medical complaints and they receive hospital care when they need it. No detainees have died at Gitmo.
To compare Gitmo to the Soviet Gulag is not only factually grotesque and a slander on American troops, but perhaps worst of all, it trivializes the horrific deaths and suffering of millions of kulaks who would have regarded Gitmo as a paradise and would have counted themselves blessed by God had they been transferred into such a place.
I'm sure that that's the last thing you want to do, R, but it is nevertheless implicit in your claim that Gitmo is in any significant way comparable to the chain of Siberian labor camps run by Stalin.
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Mr. C,
You write:
I think this position is very morally problematic. The destruction of a man's mind is no passing matter, no matter whom it is done to or why. The question of who the victim is seems to me to be utterly irrelevant--it is no less immoral to rape a rapist for sport than it is to rape an innocent for sport. God loves all His children equally. Motivation, of course, does have moral weight, but if the action is truly brutal in nature, as is the destruction of the mind of a man and the robbing of his dignity, then I think the old saying that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" must be taken seriously. We are not justified in doing anything we please to mens' minds merely because our intentions are good--there lies the road to lynchings.
A principle of humane law is that suspects are innocent until proven guilty. Not a shred of evidence has been offered for the guilt of a single person detained as an unlawful combatant by the United States military. Furthermore, large numbers of detainees have been released without charge after years of detention and brutal interrogation. What right do interrogators have to brutalize these men? Why do we assume that the ones still in detention are guilty given the large number of admitted mistakes?
Do you think that Stalin employed no communist true-believers who thought priests and dissidents were a threat to the true and the good? Scores of documents suggest that detainees give false confessions to end their brutalizations. What, precisely, other than subjective judgments about the interrogators' mindsets, is the moral difference between the Soviet and American gulags?
Are we to believe that none of those detained at Lefortovo and Lubyanka were actually suspected of plotting violence to depose state socialism? (Terorists hate our freedoms...dissidents hated their equality, no?)
Can you provide a shred of evidence that a single person detained as an enemy combatant by the U.S. government is guilty of murder? Why do the hundreds released without charge not count as 'simple peasants'?
The vast majority of the tactics Solzhenitsyn describes are explicitly allowed by U.S. policy and used with impunity. Regardless of those that are counted as "crossing lines," the fact remains that even the approved tactics are capable of the utter destruction of the human mind. That is a great evil.
Furthermore, prisoners accused of a crime have recourse to the courts to dispute their reason for detention and their treatment while detained. Enemy combatants, especially those held in secret or kidnapped, have no such rights. They are entirely subject to the cruelty and sadism of their interrogators.
As long as the United States government continues to sanction 1) the holding of prisoners indefinitely without charge, 2) the holding of prisoners in secret without access to lawyers or courts, 3) mental torture which breaks the spirit, and 4) kidnapping, it remains the operator of a Gulag. When it stops sanctioning those war crimes, I will consider the Gulag closed.
If your point is merely that the United States government is not known to sanction forced starvation, I will agree. However, the United States has indeed condemned thousands of persons to physical and psychological agony for the remainder of their lives. An Afghan detainee was kicked several thousand times in the course of a few weeks, another was boiled alive. An Iraqi had lit cigarettes placed in his ears. And thousands undergo the daily mental torture, with full sanction, that Solzhenitsyn described as breaking mens' souls. Maher Arar will never fully recover from the horrors of his treatment at the behest of the United States.
Numerous detainees in Iraq have died of exposure. We routinely deny detainees the ability to sleep for periods of over a week. The intervention teams at Gitmo are described in the FBI memos as routinely beating detainees for sport.
Glazed chicken is an MRE option, eaten routinely by soldiers in the field. And being fed, even force fed, is little comfort when one faces daily physical and psychological torture which includes the denial of sleep, near drowning experiences, being chained to the ceiling by one's wrists, and being beaten for hours on end.
Routinely detainees lose the privilege of time to pray if they do not cooperate with their interrogations. If they do cooperate, of course, they are given food, sex, time to pray, whatever they please. Doesn't that smack of forced confessions to you?
Over one hundred have died in deaths ruled homicide by military coroners in other detention facilities around the world.
How does facing up to the criminal conduct of the U.S. government, the CIA, and certain elements of military intelligence slander American troops? Whom does it slander? Those who are perpetrating criminal conduct and wish to plea-bargain down their offenses?
As Solzhenitsyn describes, prisoners often felt the same way about being transferred from one Gulag prison to another. That does not mean that those prisons in which the horrors were less totalizing were not an element of the same moral evil.
My claim is based explicitly on the four elements of similarity noted above. Any system of prisons which collects kidnapped persons and holds them indefinitely without trial or charge while destroying their minds for the purposes of the captors is a Gulag.
R
There'll be more to come, I'm sure.
