03 Mar · Fri 2006
It has been four years now
I've blogged several times before about Guantanamo, and the way in which it damages the moral and pragmatic credibility of those who either support or connive at its continued existence. It's in the news again today, this time because the BBC managed to arrange an 'interview' of sorts with one of the inmates. Otherwise, interviews with detainees have been refused to any visitors (including the UN) except the International Committee of the Red Cross --- whose standard procedure is that they will not publish their findings.
Today's article refers to comment by a US State Department spokesperson, Colleen Graffey. Something which is not mentioned in the article, but was evident from the radio interview, is the inherent inconsistency of the US position on the Guantanamo detainees.
Ms Graffey explained why the detiainees have been held for so long without access to civil legal rights: they are being treated 'according to the laws of war'. Later she maintained that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the detainees either.
It seems to me that there's no rational argument for having it both ways... either the "war on terror" is a war in fact as well as in soundbite, and the Geneva Conventions should apply, or the detainees are civilians and should have the normal rights to face charges, in open court, with legal representation.
The current tortuous bypass around any form of accountable justice is quite simply 'the law of the strongest'. It is counter-productive. Innocent or guilty, it is impossible to conclude that any detainee, if ever released from Guantanamo, would not resent their treatment whole-heartedly, unless, of course, they had already been physically and mentally broken. And who has the right to spend four years (to date) systematically breaking detainees who have not faced charges in court?
This post is perhaps unusually bitter --- but after four years of the existence of the Guantanamo camps, isn't it obvious that they have long ago lost any utility, passed through futility and now serve only to polarise opinion between the morally aggrieved and the morally bankrupt?
An accident waiting to happen
I hope Quentin Tarantino has read this. I'm just waiting for the movie version.
Cue suitable music (let's go with the old standard, Strauss' 'Blue Danube' waltz): slow exterior pan past a long axis of the International Space Station, about 6 years from now.
An astronaut comes into frame, suited up and working calmly on something outside the Space Station.
"ISS, this is Houston, what's your status?"
<beep>
"Uh, status nominal, Houston, I'll be done here in around 15 minutes"
<beep>
"Roger that, ISS. We need to take an external temperature reading... please advise."
<beep>
"Roger Houston, uh, external temp reading is ..."
<WHACK>
...
<static hiss>
Cut to oblique camera angle; a headless suit is visible, drifting towards the camera and away from the ISS. At a tangent to the suit, a small, cratered, moon-like object can be seen, starkly side-lit. As it comes closer, it is identifiable as a golf ball.
"ISS, where in Hell did that come from? Damndest thing..."
<beep>
A Canadian golf-club maker has persuaded the Russians to have one of their cosmonauts tee up and drive a golf ball off the International Space Station. All being well, the golf ball's decaying orbit over the next few million miles will be tracked using a GPS locator, and it will burn up in the upper atmosphere.
On the other hand, there's a chance it will stay in the ISS' orbital plane and, sooner or later, meet up with it again with --- so the mathematicians say --- the momentum of a 6 1/2 tonne truck doing over 60 miles an hour.
And they say space travel marks the next step in the evolution of our species...
A Canadian golf-club maker has persuaded the Russians to have one of their cosmonauts tee up and drive a golf ball off the International Space Station. All being well, the golf ball's decaying orbit over the next few million miles will be tracked using a GPS locator, and it will burn up in the upper atmosphere.
On the other hand, there's a chance it will stay in the ISS' orbital plane and, sooner or later, meet up with it again with --- so the mathematicians say --- the momentum of a 6 1/2 tonne truck doing over 60 miles an hour.
And they say space travel marks the next step in the evolution of our species...
Posted by racingsnake
@ 12:05 PM GMT+00:00
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