At 7:40 PM -0500 26/2/02, D. Simmons wrote:

>    Actually, I think "Americanness" and "Jewishness" matters quite a bit to
>many on this list. David Pearl's throat was slit and his head severed and
>paraded about because he was born an American and a Jew. It happened while he
>was being held captive. That is why I had the audacity to mention it. Unlike
>the near hysteria on this list over the possibility that an Al Queda or
>Taliban prisoner may not have an adequate selection of breakfast scones to
>select from each morning at Guantanomo, there was nothing but silence here
>concerning the treatment of prisoner Pearl at the hands of Al Queda
>sympathizers.

I must have overlooked the concerns about the quality of the scones at the Guantanomo Gulag. Of course I am aware that you have been at great pains to characterise objections to the illegal incarceration of people there as petty complaints about their treatment, but that is just a red herring.

Just to make it clear, the objection to holding these captives is not based on any sympathy for them. Neither is their breakfast menu a fundamental concern. The concern is that they are held without any lawful basis, they are being arbitrarily detained without any recourse to law.

A secondary concern has been that they are being held in cages only fit for an animal, contrary to the requirements of the Geneva convention. But there might be some practical justification for that and there are some indications that the primitive conditions might be merely temporary.

In any case, the issue is whether the US has any basis for holding these people prisoners at all, so the conditions under which they are unlawfully imprisoned is a side one.

Obviously the same principle applies to anyone who is unlawfully kidnapped and held prisoner, including the American prisoner David Pearl. To simply complain about the conditions in which he was being held, is akin to nit-picking that his execution was not carried out in a proper way. The point is that his execution was completely arbitrary and unlawful, just as his kidnapping and imprisonment was arbitrary and unlawful.

Just as the kidnapping and imprisonment of those held at Guantanomo Bay is arbitrary and unlawful.

But surely you can see that there is a world of difference between a crime committed by a furtive group of individuals and a crime committed by the most powerful nation on earth?

Surely you can see that? One group of criminals is subject to punishment if caught, and a strong likelihood that they will be caught. The other group of criminals doesn't even bother to hide their crime, relying on overwhelming brute force to protect them from punishment.

Obviously the latter group of criminals presents the biggest danger for law abiding people throughout the world, because their brazen and witless arrogance, combined with their enthusiasm and capacity to inflict violence and injury on anyone who questions them. But you seem to be arguing that, by daring to point out the crimes of the US government, we are condoning the crimes of others.

The leap of logic is not warranted.  Condemning brazen criminal behaviour by nation states does not somehow imply we are condoning criminal behaviour by secret conspiracies of individuals. It is merely an indication that we regard the former as a higher priority. Not to mention that stating our objections is about the only thing we can do, making a citizen's arrest is quite impractical and there is no police force with the resources to apprehend them. In any case, there are millions of crimes committed every day by individuals and criminal gangs. It is absurd to expect each and every crime to be individually condemned by anyone who wants to condemn any particular crime.

As the following article demonstrates, the prisoners at Guantanomo are being held by the US government on a mere whim. There appears to be not the slightest idea what they are going to do with them and little or no evidence that they have committed any crimes with which they can be charged. They are being held arbitrarily and unlawfully by a government that has no respect for and probably no comprehension of the concept of the rule of law.

I'm indignant about that because I expect the government of a great power to behave differently. But if you want us to judge the US government (and the US people) by the standards of common criminals and organised criminal gangs in backward countries, then your comparison of the crimes and our reaction to the crimes makes sense.

Or do you just want to distract attention from the crimes of your government, by demanding that we focus instead on the crimes of some rat-bag fringe group in Pakistan? Of course their argument would probably be that two wrongs make a right, revenge is justified, no matter if the person they take revenge on is completely innocent of involvement in the crimes of the US government.

Just for the record, I don't agree. Likewise I don't agree that the US Government is justified in punishing the prisoners at Guantanomo Bay for crimes which the US Government can produce no evidence they were involved in. I'm sure that, like the Pakistani thugs, the US government is very keen to punish someone. Someone as it happens that they can't actually get their hands on (the same problem the murderers of Danial Pearl have.)

So just like Pearl's murderers, the US government is arbitrarily venting its frustration on the nearest thing they can find. Yes, the crimes are very similar. Yes, they are both crimes. But the criminals are not equal by any stretch of the imagination, one is a much greater concern than the other, because one possesses a greater capacity to lower the tone of the world's affairs.

Bill Bartlett
Bracknell Tas

---

http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,658785,00.html

US fails to find evidence at Camp X-Ray

Matthew Engel in Washington
Wednesday February 27, 2002
The Guardian

Despite holding nearly 500 prisoners from the war in Afghanistan, the Americans have still not identified any that might be suitable candidates for the military tribunals set up after the September 11 attacks. And the Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke admitted yesterday that the US government was still working out the rules under which the tribunals would operate.

However, both Ms Clarke and her boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, rejected suggestions that there was any hold-up gathering evidence against the prisoners.

"There is no holdup," Ms Clarke said. The new situation presented by the war meant much work had to go into constructing new rules. "But there's also not a sense that we've got a person or two people that we feel are really likely candidates," she admitted.

With 194 prisoners already at Guantanamo Bay - all supposedly hardened terrorists - and a further 300 still held in Afghanistan, the failure to identify a single candidate for a tribunal will cause further unease among US allies, already concerned about the implications of US unwillingness to concede the captives prisoner-of-war status.

Yesterday the home secretary, David Blunkett, criticised Mr Rumsfeld for saying that British prisoners at Camp X-Ray could be allowed home provided they were prosecuted in this country. He said Mr Rumsfeld was "probably not aware that we have a crown prosecution service".

He added: "Before anyone is detained and before they're charged, the crown prosecution service has to examine the evidence that's been presented against them and that is what we will do."

He said the government would be "seeking clarification" of Mr Rumsfeld's remarks. "If anyone is transferred to this country it will be on the evidence in this case, the evidence that the United States have adduced from picking them up in Afghanistan," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"It's not appropriate to make a judgment about what you do with someone before they've been charged, never mind afterwards."

The Pentagon admission about the lack of evidence gathered from the prisoners appears to confirm the suspicion that the tribunal option was set up hastily to avoid the possibility of having to give Osama bin Laden, or one of his leading cohorts, an OJ Simpson-style showbiz trial, but was never properly thought through.

Mr Rumsfeld said the US had not even attempted to sort the prisoners for possible prosecution yet. It had been focusing on extracting intelligence, and the process of deciding who might be tried for what was just starting.

He said there were six options for the prisoners: placing them before a tribunal, putting them through the criminal justice system, putting them through the US military justice system, sending them back to their country of origin, detention for the period of the conflict, and release. He thought "some" of the prisoners might be appropriate candidates for the tribunals.

Mr Rumsfeld said last week he would prefer that they be sent back to their home countries. But he added that they would only be repatriated to countries that were certain to prosecute them. The US did not want them to "get in more airplanes and have them fly into the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre again," he said.