Fanon, Guantánamo, and We the People

"The worst of the worst"--this is how Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense until December 2006, described the men who are being held at Guantanamo Bay. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until October 2005, said of them that they are "so vicious, if given a chance they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines of a C-17 while they were being flown to Cuba" (William Schulz, www.securitypeace.org/pdf/schulz.pdi). The suicides by hanging in June 2006 by three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay were seen by one government official as "a marketing ploy" and "public relations act." The 380+ men at Guantanamo Bay are "the wretched" of our national earth; their bodies are at the mercy of an overwhelmingly determined and arbitrary machinery of legal power: in September 2006, the men and women of the United States Congress gave the Bush administration license to do with these men whatever it wished when, through the passage of the Military Commissions Act, it stripped them of a fundamental protection of a modern judicial system--the right to habeas corpus, i.e., the right to appear in court and challenge the validity of one's imprisonment. Habeas corpus is a Latin phrase that translates literally, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, as "thou (shalt) have the body (in court)." In the realm of law, the right to habeas corpus is deemed fundamental and inviolable to a society recognizing the sacredness of the individual. It is a protection that dates back to 1231, but our elected officials have denied the detainees access to this basic guarantee of their humanity. The irony is that in the congressional debate spotlighting torture and the appropriate and acceptable techniques of interrogation (a debate that was being held in the summer of 2006), the nation's attention was diverted away from the equally important issue of habeas corpus. Torture is sensational, torture is headline material; but habeas corpus is a Latin phrase, seemingly arcane, deceptively obscure. And we the people did not notice, or we chose not to notice. Habeas corpus rights, though fundamental to the framework of a democracy and the bedrock principle of the U. S. legal system, does not carry with it the same emotional charge, and so its resonance with the common man or woman is not as powerful. The differing emotional valence of torture and habeas corpus gave the Bush administration a compelling advantage in the discussions that resulted in the passage of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) that the President signed into law on October 17, 2006. For several weeks prior to the passage of this bill, Congress and the people were riveted on the question of torture--what constitutes it and whether and to what extent it behooves us as a nation to abide by Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Three Republican senators--John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner--formed a formidable phalanx of resistance to any language that watered down the nation's commitment to Article 3 of the Geneva Convention that specifically outlawed torture and stipulated the humane treatment of prisoners. They were opposed by their more hawkish Republican fellow congressmen, but the three stood firm in the initial phases of the debate, insisting on the strategic value of our commitment to Article 3. The media carried the debate, and Op Ed pages ran submissions on the wisdom of abiding by the Geneva Convention. It appeared that the nation could congratulate itself on having participated in a morally bracing discussion of what interrogation techniques were acceptable in the interest of protecting people. Despite these discussions, however, the final language of the bill is highly unspecific on what exactly can be defined as torture and grants the military enormous latitude in determining whether an interrogation technique has been inhumane. In addition, I submit, the question of torture served ultimately as an expedient distraction for the more egregious violation that ultimately became part of the Military Commissions Act, namely, the withholding of habeas rights from any non-citizen captured on suspicion of terrorist activity. …