Guantanamo - hyperbole and myth.

Undoubtedly Guantanamo's closure would be a good thing - for one thing it has become a rally point for people denouncing the U.S. then, and despite what the president may say, it is not in line with international standards (nor with any standard at all for it has its own standards, apparently). Moreover there have been enough reports of abuse at the facility to undermine this country's reputation for upholding human rights, thus making its credibility more fragile.

On the other hand, and as it has been pointed out in many editorials this week, Amnesty International's comparison of Guantanamo Bay to the Gulags of the Soviet Union is ludicrous and has somewhat undermined the credibiliy of the whole report. A good article published by The International Herald Tribune yesterday gives a good analysis of the danger of hyperbole and dubious historical comparisons:

it revives the tired specter of moral equivalency between flawed democracies and totalitarian dictatorships - a specter particularly obscene when real gulags still exist in places like North Korea. It also gives the Bush administration an "out" to deflect attention from its own policies to its critics' hyperbole.The hyperbole is wrong - but that's cold comfort to those of us who believe America should hold itself to a higher standard than "we're better than the gulag.

Yet one thing bothers me in this otherwise excellent article by Cathy Young - it is this part:

It is important to remember that the United States is dealing with the unprecedented situation of de facto enemy combatants who belong not to the army of a hostile state but to a vast, murky terror network - a network that proved its deadliness on Sept. 11, 2001, and other occasions. This does not give America carte blanche for indefinite detention without charges, let alone torture of suspects, but it does pose serious issues of balancing civil rights and national security that other democracies, such as France, are grappling with as well.

Her use of the (albeit quite common) myth of "a vast, murky terror network" troubles me for, as we have already discussed on our blog before, while terrorism is an undeniable reality, the idea of a "vast network" organization is not only untrue but dangerous. The Christian Science Monitor is one among many that has analyzed the myth of a powerful terrorist network, showing that Al Qaeda has become the easy label used by both politicians and the media to name the perpetrators of all terrorist attacks:

By allowing Al Qaeda to become the top brand name of international terrorism, Washington has packaged the "enemy" into something with a structure, a leader, and a main area of operation.

So it is a bit ironic that while rightfully denouncing the hyperbole of the Gulag comparison, Cathy Young somehow 'justifies' the initial idea of Guantanamo by using a threat of mythical proporitions which has little to do with reality.

Last but not least, it seems to me that the closure of the prison camp won't change much of anything if the real issues of abuse and due process are not addressed. Those issues as well as the question of how relevant the info obtained from the prisoners in Guantanamo should also be thrown into the public debate.