Giant steps
Giant steps
Updated 01:29am (Mla time) Sept 16, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THERE'S a play that's taken the United Kingdom and the United States by storm. It's called "Guantanamo: Honour-Bound To Defend Freedom." It was written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, based on the accounts of 11 British inmates of Guantanamo Detention Center in Cuba. The 11 are Muslims, picked up in various parts of the world and detained without charges, without evidence and for most of them, without hope of being released.
They are among 600 prisoners, all Muslims, being held in Guantanamo. The play tells of the terror wreaked upon the suspects, which is the biggest secret that lies at the heart of America today. It is also its "biggest issue of injustice," as Brittain puts it. She adds: "The outrage of Guantanamo is so overwhelming that when people actually began to hear about it they couldn't believe it."
"There is no law here," one of the jailers says in the play. "It doesn't apply." When the play opened in the United States recently, several newspapers asked if the same question might not apply to America itself today.
"Guantanamo" was one of the things Mary Ann Wright mentioned last Monday when she breezed into Manila and spoke before a group of Americans living in this country, who are of course also overseas voters. She was here to campaign for John Kerry, or more specifically to campaign against George W. Bush. Wright may be a familiar name to some Filipinos. She was a spark of light amid the near-total darkness in the days prior to the US invasion of Iraq.
A career diplomat for 15 years, Wright resigned her post in March 2003 over differences with the US government's policies toward the world. This was a time when Bush had terrorized his country enough to coerce bipartisan support for his war and stifle nearly all dissent in his country. Wright had served in several hardship posts, or diplomatic flashpoints, over the last decade and a half: Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Somalia, Grenada and Nicaragua. In 1997, she received the State Department's Award for Heroism for her role in evacuating 2,500 persons during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Before that she served in the US Army for 26 years, earning the rank of colonel.
Her letter to Colin Powell on March 19, 2003 set out her reasons for resigning. "This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an administration of the US. I disagree with the administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea, and the curtailment of civil liberties in the US." She amplified the last in this wise: "Solitary confinement without access to legal counsel cuts at the heart of the legal foundations upon which our country stands. Additionally, I believe the administration's secrecy in the judicial process has created an atmosphere of fear to speak out against the gutting or protections on which America was built and the protections we encourage other countries to provide to their citizens."
Guantanamo stands first among those that cut at the heart of the legal foundations of America--no, more than legal, the moral foundations of that country. As Wright says, it took the United Kingdom two years of dogged legal effort to get three of its nationals released. Their stories became the basis of the play "Guantanamo." Soon after the three were repatriated to the United Kingdom, they were released for lack of evidence. The United Kingdom, said Wright, was America's chief ally in its invasion of Iraq. "Can you imagine what other countries would have to go through to get their nationals out of that prison?"
She can understand, Wright says, why Bush bitterly opposes the International Criminal Court. (The United States is not a signatory to it, even while regaling the world with the trial of Saddam Hussein.) "Some of what the US government has done easily qualify as war crimes."
Two things Wright worries about in particular as a result of the terrorism Bush is wreaking upon the world and his own country: The first is that it will fan terrorism and encourage America's enemies to do to American nationals what America is doing to its detainees in Guantanamo. "If I were a soldier today stationed abroad, I'd be very scared."
The second is that it isn't just fomenting ill-will against Americans abroad, it is subverting America's moral standing completely. Unfortunately, she says, most Americans do not realize this. "Unlike you," she said, the American public does not get to see Al Jazeera or be exposed to other points of view." (I did not get the chance to say we do not get to see Al Jazeera either, and that more than the Americans, Filipinos subscribe to the viewpoint of Fox Network.) It's time the soiling of the American image abroad stopped, she said. That was why she was supporting Kerry.
Well, I myself do not share her optimism about the great changes Kerry will work for if he wins the elections. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president for eight years and he implemented the embargo on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. And he was much intimidated by the US military. But I am truly glad there are people, Wright at the forefront of them, who are fighting the real war against terrorism, which is not just to be found in the deserts of Afghanistan but in the redoubts of Washington. The changes in American policy may prove far slower in a Kerry government than Wright supposes (alongside America's libertarian traditions, which have stood for 200 years, are its expansionist drives, which have been advanced and defended not least by its Hearsts and Foxes), but right now anyone or anything other than Bush should represent a vast improvement in and from America.
No, more than a vast improvement, a giant step for humankind.
Updated 01:29am (Mla time) Sept 16, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the September 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THERE'S a play that's taken the United Kingdom and the United States by storm. It's called "Guantanamo: Honour-Bound To Defend Freedom." It was written by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, based on the accounts of 11 British inmates of Guantanamo Detention Center in Cuba. The 11 are Muslims, picked up in various parts of the world and detained without charges, without evidence and for most of them, without hope of being released.
They are among 600 prisoners, all Muslims, being held in Guantanamo. The play tells of the terror wreaked upon the suspects, which is the biggest secret that lies at the heart of America today. It is also its "biggest issue of injustice," as Brittain puts it. She adds: "The outrage of Guantanamo is so overwhelming that when people actually began to hear about it they couldn't believe it."
"There is no law here," one of the jailers says in the play. "It doesn't apply." When the play opened in the United States recently, several newspapers asked if the same question might not apply to America itself today.
"Guantanamo" was one of the things Mary Ann Wright mentioned last Monday when she breezed into Manila and spoke before a group of Americans living in this country, who are of course also overseas voters. She was here to campaign for John Kerry, or more specifically to campaign against George W. Bush. Wright may be a familiar name to some Filipinos. She was a spark of light amid the near-total darkness in the days prior to the US invasion of Iraq.
A career diplomat for 15 years, Wright resigned her post in March 2003 over differences with the US government's policies toward the world. This was a time when Bush had terrorized his country enough to coerce bipartisan support for his war and stifle nearly all dissent in his country. Wright had served in several hardship posts, or diplomatic flashpoints, over the last decade and a half: Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Somalia, Grenada and Nicaragua. In 1997, she received the State Department's Award for Heroism for her role in evacuating 2,500 persons during the civil war in Sierra Leone. Before that she served in the US Army for 26 years, earning the rank of colonel.
Her letter to Colin Powell on March 19, 2003 set out her reasons for resigning. "This is the only time in my many years serving America that I have felt I cannot represent the policies of an administration of the US. I disagree with the administration's policies on Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, North Korea, and the curtailment of civil liberties in the US." She amplified the last in this wise: "Solitary confinement without access to legal counsel cuts at the heart of the legal foundations upon which our country stands. Additionally, I believe the administration's secrecy in the judicial process has created an atmosphere of fear to speak out against the gutting or protections on which America was built and the protections we encourage other countries to provide to their citizens."
Guantanamo stands first among those that cut at the heart of the legal foundations of America--no, more than legal, the moral foundations of that country. As Wright says, it took the United Kingdom two years of dogged legal effort to get three of its nationals released. Their stories became the basis of the play "Guantanamo." Soon after the three were repatriated to the United Kingdom, they were released for lack of evidence. The United Kingdom, said Wright, was America's chief ally in its invasion of Iraq. "Can you imagine what other countries would have to go through to get their nationals out of that prison?"
She can understand, Wright says, why Bush bitterly opposes the International Criminal Court. (The United States is not a signatory to it, even while regaling the world with the trial of Saddam Hussein.) "Some of what the US government has done easily qualify as war crimes."
Two things Wright worries about in particular as a result of the terrorism Bush is wreaking upon the world and his own country: The first is that it will fan terrorism and encourage America's enemies to do to American nationals what America is doing to its detainees in Guantanamo. "If I were a soldier today stationed abroad, I'd be very scared."
The second is that it isn't just fomenting ill-will against Americans abroad, it is subverting America's moral standing completely. Unfortunately, she says, most Americans do not realize this. "Unlike you," she said, the American public does not get to see Al Jazeera or be exposed to other points of view." (I did not get the chance to say we do not get to see Al Jazeera either, and that more than the Americans, Filipinos subscribe to the viewpoint of Fox Network.) It's time the soiling of the American image abroad stopped, she said. That was why she was supporting Kerry.
Well, I myself do not share her optimism about the great changes Kerry will work for if he wins the elections. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was president for eight years and he implemented the embargo on Iraq, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. And he was much intimidated by the US military. But I am truly glad there are people, Wright at the forefront of them, who are fighting the real war against terrorism, which is not just to be found in the deserts of Afghanistan but in the redoubts of Washington. The changes in American policy may prove far slower in a Kerry government than Wright supposes (alongside America's libertarian traditions, which have stood for 200 years, are its expansionist drives, which have been advanced and defended not least by its Hearsts and Foxes), but right now anyone or anything other than Bush should represent a vast improvement in and from America.
No, more than a vast improvement, a giant step for humankind.
posted by Dante at 5:31 PM
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