Camp X-Ray
Created | Updated Jan 31, 2002
This may well be the start of a kind of irregular opinion column for me…depending on whether I get kicked off the site or not for starting fights. Basically my idea is not to pull my punches, and to start arguments with people. With this preamble out of the way, I’m going to talk to you about Camp X-Ray.
Firstly, the terrorist actions on September the 11th were obscene. America had every right to get angry and to try and cease international terrorism because of its evil, by almost any means. They started to react in a dignified manner. When the Taliban stood in their way, bombing military targets was a sound tactic to aid the campaign. Continuing bombing civilians and piles of already bombed rubble was not such a good idea. The US was suddenly going too far. It refused to stop. This was condemned as dubious, but even critics were subdued and largely outspoken. Now we see how the prisoners are being treated.
Suspected terrorists are being kept on their hands and knees in outside cages, deprived of their powers to see, smell and touch. Fed with slop, they are treated hugely roughly by moronic slack-jawed American soldiers. These men are only 'suspected' terrorists. They have, as yet, done nothing wrong. Yet they are treated worse than we treat animals that we are going to eat. Their existence is a hellish one, yet almost no one seems to care.
Quite the contrary: it seems only right that we treat them as we believe they would treat us. Let them burn in Hell! We obviously have the religious prerogative because they are heathen. Thus we can treat them however we want. They deserve to be punished in this way. They would do it to our prisoners (wrong – I suspect no one but the American government – safe in its own bloated, corrupt cocoon of self-righteous power – would dream of treating people like this) so we can do it to theirs. Obviously.
What gets me is how we can stand here and agree that treating them like this is the right thing to do. True, many of them have evil intentions, but if we do this to them, we justify their hatred. We sink to their level, if not lower. Killing them, without trial, out of hand, because we want to, in a move hastily made legal is a revolting thing to do. I don't care what they have done, they do not deserve to be treated like this. Even our own worst serial killers are not treated like this. Even the ones on death row are allowed things like indoor toilets and solid food, for Christ's sake!
It makes me so angry to see journalists on all sides sit from behind their comfortable desks and condemn people to death trusting in their own manifold righteousness. What happen to Christian ideals of brotherly love – 'love thy enemy' is something Jesus himself is supposed to have said. This is probably Bush's idea of tough love. It's for their own good, this eternal damnation. Surely extending dignity to them, in even a slight degree, would do far more than petty, gratuitous revenge seeking? But no. An eye for an eye and all that. So very noble of us.
