Gitmo Should Be Shut Down

I know it's surprising to hear from a hard-nosed conservative who was an avid supporter of the war since the beginning and still defends its purposes and its results, regardless of many of the questionable intelligence practices that propelled our nation to war, but Gitmo is a public relations disaster of epic proportions. To be absolutely fair, Amnesty International calling Gitmo the new Gulag is ridiculous if anyone has any understanding of the dimensions and degrees of the Soviet Gulag Archipelago. As someone who read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's spectacular chronicling of the gulag when I was twelve years old, the torture practices and size of the Soviet empire's gulag are indelibly imprinted in my memory. The fact is, millions of people died in the Soviet gulag, perhaps several tens of millions . . . . no one will ever know for sure. Only 540 people are currently held at Gitmo, and although others have passed through it or several similar institutions around the world, it is not even comparable to the gulag in size or horror.

Likewise, the Alberto Gonzalez was wrong when he wrote that 2002 memo justifying the use of hoods, pressure points, and sleep deprivation. Perhaps in a perfect world, if we knew that we held prisoner a person who had knowledge of an imminent nuclear attack, then perhaps . . . probably . . . torture to save the lives of millions would be justifiable, for self-defense reasons. Unfortunately, intelligence gathered through means of torture or practices tending toward torture is notoriously unreliable, and has proven to be so ever since the French practices during the Battle of Algiers in 1956 and 1957. The hardcore zealots will resist the torture or will provide false information. It is in their nature to take it to the limit.

And when we first begin to justify limited use of force such as pressure points and hoods, the line is blurred, and we slowly become that which we hate most. We become what we set out to put an end to in the beginning. No matter what official policy is, the result is Abu Ghraib and a collection of secret detention centers that leftwing critics around the world are calling the American gulag. Fallible human beings cannot draw the line at what is torture and what is acceptable when once we begin to sink into that moral gray area.

The ends do not justify the means. It is our calling and duty as that city on a hill that Ronald Reagan spoke about that we, as much as is possible, remain above reproach when it comes to human rights most importantly when it is in relation to our treatment of prisoners. Because so many people hate us and because we have raised the bar for ourselves internationally by our willingness to attack regimes that violate human rights (i.e. Iraq), our enemies look for every opportunity to point to apparent hypocrisy and various other chinks in our moral armor. I am not advocating merely giving into every criticism that emanates from people who do not have the stomach to stand up and fight for justice and human rights. Many of them have never seen a war that looked justifed to them. I am saying that we need to intelligently realize that when we remain above reproach when it comes to human rights, we speak with greater authority and the world respects us more. That is a consideration we must make.