The Road to Guantanamo

In a Newsweek article of 21 November, 2005, Sen. John McCain (AZ) claimed that the United States should not torture prisoners taken in the war on terror because it didn't produce reliable intelligence, it hurt our reputation abroad, and, most importantly, it fundamentally runs counter to our democratic values.

"Our greatest strength" he said, is that we are different and better than our enemies, that we fight for an idea, not a tribe, not a land, not a king, not a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion, but for an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights."

Now, I grew up conservative, but I've grown into just enough of a liberal to twitch at words like "better" when dealing with the subject of cultures and nations. The President and his coterie might call this moral cowardice. The thing is, I would probably agree, but it took a film like The Road to Guantanamo to reveal to me just how crucial moral confidence is, because the debacle of Gauntanamo is itself a result not of confidence but, indeed, of cowardice.

The film is part documentary, part drama. Through interviews and reenactments, it relates the story of the "Tipton Three," a trio of British-Pakistani young men who visited Pakistan in 2001 to find one of their number a wife. During their time there, they took a trip to Afghanistan to see if they could help the people there who would be affected by the American bombings. Strangers in a strange land, they become entangled with a confusing stream of people flowing into and out of Afghan cities, until they are arrested by Northern Alliance fighters, who take their valuables and their passports. They are then turned over, without documents, to the Americans, and they will spend two years being tortured in Kandahar and Guantanamo prisons before they are finally released with neither an explanation nor an apology.

Let me make sure this is clear: three free citizens of the United Kingdom were detained, abused, and denied council, due process, or any contact with the outside world, for two years, before being released without comment.

The film rightly takes an aggressively critical view of the Americans' behavior, but it is worth mentioning that in doing so it glosses over certain mitigating circumstances on the part of the American soldiers. For one, their prisoners had no documentation, and were given to them with a group of others who were captured, after a recent combat, with various armaments in their possession. The Americans certainly had reason to be cautious.

But they had no right to be tyrants.

The only distinction the film portrays between the three's treatment at the hands of the rather mercenary Northern Alliance and at those of the Americans is that the Americans had more paperwork. And, then, as an American, I felt much more ashamed of the Americans' behavior. From their first contact with an American officer the three young men were assumed guilty of association with either the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. When it was learned they were from Britain, they were immediately insulted and called traitors. Having abandoned the basic and fundamental presumption of innocence, the Americans could only institute an increasingly absurd drama of ignorance and fear.

The film itself doesn't make a clear case for fear underlying abuse and torture, but it presents evidence enough in its integrity to the three men's stories. The guards do not permit the prisoners to speak, to pray, to walk around in their cells. When they wish to interrogate one of them, the others must huddle in one end of the yard while one of their number is made to lie face-down in the dirt near the gate so three guards can pounce on him, bind him, and lead him into a small, dark and humid room where he will be held at gunpoint, yelled at, falsely accused and beaten for telling the truth. True power does not act so. True power - moral power - is confident in itself, is graceful and benevolent because it believes in itself. It does not need to demean its enemy - especially when it does not have proof that it has an enemy. And it certainly does not need to make up lies in order to extract dubious confessions.

What is the logic here? You assume a man is guilty of fighting with Al-Qaeda, so you sit him down and say, "You are associated with Al-Qaeda." The man says, No. You beat him and repeat yourself, "We know you are associated with Al-Qaeda." He repeats himself: No. You beat him repeatedly. Repeat. When he denies the charge, you think he is lying - he is therefore a liar. If he affirms the charge, you also know he is a liar, because you know you made up the evidence. Well, you thought he was probably a liar beforehand, so now you know...about as much as you already knew - only you've stained your soul by striking a man under your protection.

Among other tortures, one man has his wrists and ankles bound to a hook in the floor so that he had to crouch for hours in a small, sterile room while they flashed strobe lights at him and played bad heavy metal music at an oppressive volume. When he at last broke down and confessed to being a "fighter," they were not satisfied with his confession, and insisted he further confess to being Al-Qaeda.

They took each of them, one by one, and said, "Your two friends both testified that you're Al-Qaeda." This was a lie, and everyone knew it. And each of the three had the moral courage to deny not only the charge but the testimony: "They never said that. You are making that up."

They were shown blurry photos and videos and told they could be clearly seen in the crowd of protesters. One of them pointed out that, by the date of the video, he could not be in it since he was still in England - a fact, he pointed out, that they well-knew since they had a record of some trouble he'd had with the police. No, said his upright, liberty-loving American interrogator, I can see you right there.

Is this the civilization the Middle East is supposed to desire more than the one it has? Is this the great cultural value system we have taken upon ourselves to export to distant lands? Is this the behavior of a free, enlightened, democratic citizenship?

No. This is the behavior of people afraid of what they didn't even know could hurt them. This is the behavior of people more concerned with their own safety than with their human dignity.

Even at the time I first read McCain's article, there was something intrinsically sensible about it. Not just because of the practical concerns of the intelligence and reputation objections, but because of the values objection. If we're to make any sense of our duties toward other nations, we must understand and affirm the values at the heart of our own system. And, in fact, we must believe they are the best values out there. If they are not, why should we settle for them? Why shouldn't we fight for something different, or emigrate to a nation whose values we do share?

These questions hit home for me during a recent discussion with a class of freshmen whom I teach college composition. We were discussing some readings on Islam, Christianity and democracy, and a student asked whether religious people ought to compromise their values in order to live in a society, or if the structure of that society ought to change to incorporate them. This is the basic question of pluralism and multiculturalism: who takes precedence, the individual or society? It was my pedagogical commitment to interfere as little as possible with the course of the discussion this day, so I chose not to suggest that this was a false dichotomy, that in reality things are far more complicated and therefore far more plausible. Instead, I allowed other students to chime in, and most gave the predictable answer: that values are subjective and private, and therefore society should change to accept the values of its members.

Eventually I had to stick my professorial wrench in their postmodernist gears. Are there not, I asked, universal values? We have both secular and Muslim sources here who say there are. Is there not a point at which you say, No, I cannot accept your belief and cannot allow you to practice it because it is harmful to society? Some people value killing those who disagree with them - should society change for them? If someone pressed you to affirm what you believe, what would you say? Where would you stand? At what point would you say, No further - I must stand here?

Silence.

At last, one of my little liberals chimed in again, and she had the courage to admit that she didn't know what she thought, that she had a hard time saying there are some values that are always true. I know how she feels. That kind of language, the language of universals, often implies also the language of absolutes, of certainty; it approaches the language of the very people violence we reject and recoil at. Our awareness of our historical condition, of the contingency of so much we believe, is the inheritance of liberalism. We want proofs before we act; we want to be satisfied that we know "enough" before we commit to something. But, as John Henry Newman once said, "Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith."

When one of the sharpest minds of the 19th century talks about assumptions that are faith, we can be sure he doesn't mean blind faith, ignorant faith. In fact, it just was his searching for the foundations of knowledge that led him to faith, for he saw that Reason, if it is truly rigorous, and honest to itself in its rigor, will never be satisfied. Rather, at some point we say, "I do not know the sun will rise tomorrow, I do not know I will not fall down the stairs and break my neck before even I begin today, and I do not know that one whit of what I do will last beyond my doing it, but I will go out nonetheless and face the task of living."

To affirm that all persons are created equal, and deserve equal dignity before the law; to affirm that all people have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--this is not also to say I will then go out and make all people likewise affirm these values. But it is to say that the burden of proof is on the person who says that some lives are dispensable or even deserve to be destroyed. It is to say that the burden of proof is on the person who says it is better to hold my fellow man prisoner because I am afraid of him than it is to release him because I have no evidence against him. On the person who says that allegiances must be total and absolute, and that disagreements are best solved by exterminating those who dissent.

As I was describing all this to my wife later that night, I felt a sadness for my students--not because they did not have a moral center on which to act, but because they did, but had been trained to fear expressing it, to mistrust it as a foundation for public actions. It is as though their souls have been enchained, I said, and told they can only come out at night, lest they hurt someone else's feelings. It is the great power and the great social value of films like The Road to Guantanamo that they grab the soul in its captivity to false principles and stretch its chains to the point of breaking, if only we will take the last step ourselves--and decide it is worth the risk.