Thankful for Guantanamo
Sometimes I browse it and see something that I missed, something important. Mahvish Khan’s article on Guantanamo detainees is an important article that I had missed.
In many ways the article is an example of American contradictions. Khan worked as a translator and legal aid for a defense lawyer at Gitmo. From her account, her sympathy for the detainees would not have been lost on military personnel; yet, there is no sense of any attempt to censor her writings now. Someone might well conclude that oppression should be made of sterner stuff.
Yet, the more I read, the more it was clear that even if the part of Gitmo she saw is not a torture chamber, it is still a monument to the banality of evil.
(I can hear the objections to the Nazi reference now. So, let’s be clear. Most assuredly Gitmo is no death camp, and as concentration camps or detention centers go, well, there have been worse. But it was in grappling with the question of how the German culture could descend so thoroughly into savagery and madness that Westerners—and Americans in particular--began to realize (or remember) that apparently civilized people could do evil on a grand scale without full consciousness of it. So it is out of necessity that I evoke the Nazis, and the men and women who have tried to understand them, when trying to grapple with American evils today.)
In the case of Gitmo, as seen from Mahvish Kahn’s perspective, much of the evil seems bureaucratic. People of dubious guilt are imprisoned half a world away from their homes for years. Now, three or four years after they arrived, they are treated with a weird inconsistency. For example, they are provided or denied letters from relatives for no apparent reasons of security. Most are kept in isolated conditions that, over time, almost certainly damages the sanity of all but the strongest.
The evil here doesn’t stem from sadism. Instead it is a sort of indifference. The people there are not worth the resources or political will it would take to straighten things out.
So both our enemies and the innocent sit and rot.
So why in the name of anything that might be holy am I thankful for the prison at Guantanamo?
Because we can see it. Because we can read Khan’s account and realize, with sickening certainty, that this is probably the best of the prisons in which America keeps its enemies both real and imagined. Because this pushes us to wonder what happens elsewhere and to try and find out.
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PS Khan also participated in an online interview for the Post.