Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Theater Of The Absurd

If you're a regular reader, you know that I make it a point to read through the transcripts of the Gitmo CSRT hearings. And as a whole I find them oddly evocative portraits of what will certainly be looked back upon as the defining conflict of our times.

On the one hand, representing the foremost power of the modern world, you've got a military commission which, if imperfectly and even unjustly constituted, is made up of individual men and women who lack any apparent brutality, and seem committed to conducting the proceedings with whatever honor and justice is possible under the circumstances.

On the other, representing a ragtag militia movement that has dedicated itself to combatting not only America but modernity itself, you've got men of varying backgrounds, levels of sophistication, and scruples, expressing in broken English their dedication to a cause they consider just.

And lurking in the shadows, often conjured but appearing only in redacted glimpses, are al-Qaeda and its mimetic twin, the CIA black hole detention system, each with its own methodology of terror and brutality.

Probably none of the transcripts captures the unlikely protagonists more poignantly than that of Zayn Al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Palestinian who served as a conduit helping to funnel jihadi recruits from a safehouse in Pakistan to an independent training camp in Afghanistan.

Husayn, also known as Zubaydah, is apparently epileptic, suffering from memory lapses and weakness initially caused by an old shrapnel injury, but exacerbated by torture (redacted from the transcript) that he alleges he suffered at the hands of his CIA captors.

In his testimony, he makes the distinction between the defensive jihad he supported, and the offensive jihad espoused by Osama Bin Laden, a distinction not recognized by the military's definition of enemy combatants. He describes how Bin Laden eventually intervened with the Taliban to have Husayn's camp, and any others that refused to merge with his own, closed.

He expresses his revulsion at the targetting of innocent civilians, and describes how he refused to accept the "extremist" jihadis into his training camp, a refusal that caused him to be targeted and threatened by rival factions.

He demands to be tried not for attacking civilians, which he finds morally repugnant, but for something he is proud of: His commitment to defending Muslims from invasion and oppression. And while acknowledging being an enemy of America and Israel, both of whom he accuses of oppressing his people, he denies any hatred of the American people or Jews per se and professes a youthful admiration for American culture.

Husayn was sworn to defending Muslim lands from invasion. So when America invaded Afghanistan, he fought alongside the Taliban, where he was eventually captured and later identified by the Y2K plotter, Ahmed Ressam, who had passed through his training camp. Husayn claims he provided Ressam and others like him combat training, often based on American military manuals, but never instructed him to attack America.

It's clear that when he was initially detained, Husayn knew the names and identities of people likely to commit acts of violence against American troops and in some cases American civilians. And were he free to run his training camp today, he'd certainly be turning out jihadis bent on driving American forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

So there was good reason to detain and interrogate him, and there's good reason to keep him and others like him off the battlefield for the duration of hostilities. But that could have been accomplished without the damage to our integrity that we've suffered as a result of the enemy combatant system as a whole.

Less clear is what happens years from now, when the battlefields have moved on but people like Zayn Al Abidin Muhammad Husayn are still languishing in American military prisons, and the only things we have to remind us of why they're there are these transcripts.

Posted by Judah in:  Global War On Terror   Human Rights   

Comments (0)

e-mail  |  del.icio.us  |  digg