George W Bush has become a particular focus for criticism. Five British prisoners who were held without trial for two years at Guantanamo Bay returned to Britain in March 2004. One of them, Jamal al-Harith, claimed that prisoners at Camp Delta were brutally beaten and subjected to mental torture: devout Muslims were forced to watch prostitutes displaying themselves, for example; Inmates were forced to drink dirty water, and given meals up to ten years past their sell-by date. Jamal al-Harith's cell was a wire cage, open to the elements, to snakes and to scorpions. He said, "The whole point of Guantanamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture - bruises heal after a week, but the other stuff stays with you."

Of course those of us who have not visited Camp Delta for ourselves cannot know with absolute certainly that these allegations are true; but the journalist David Rose reports that he interviewed three of the released men, and that they had each been interrogated 200 times, both by MI5 and by various American agencies, often for twelve hours at a time. Even without beatings this must surely be seen as brutal, and, as Rose says, any confession achieved by such means cannot safely be regarded as reliable. Such reports increase wide-spread anxiety about the holding of people without trial. Rose says:

'Eroding legal fairness and due process doesn't merely negate the very values which the terrorists most want to attack. It is also a remarkably ineffective, even counter-productive way of protecting ourselves, and of preventing future atrocities.'

Calling on evidence from the struggle against IRA terrorism he points out that internment is a fertile recruiting ground. He quotes an American official who told him that in proportion to the size and cost of Camp Delta not very many of its detainees were really serious terrorists; but experience at the Camp might very well lead "a farmer who got swept along and did very little" to come out "a fully fledged jihadist." "Due process values adopted by advanced societies," claims Rose, "have evolved because, more than the alternatives, they work."(Evening Standard, 16th March)

In an article in the London Review of Books (1st April 2004) Richard Rorty also questions whether civic rights should be suspended in the interests of national security. Politicians and bureaucrats charged with the protection of the state "will strive to outdo one another in proposing outrageous measures" he claims. This will result in "a cascade of government actions that would, in the course of a few years, bring about a fundamental change in the conditions of social life in the West." In fact he says that, as an American, "I have spent more time worrying about what my government will do than about what the terrorists will do."

Rorty seriously believes that "the end of the rule of law could come about almost inadvertently, in both the US and Europe, through the sheer momentum of the institutional changes that are likely to be made in the name of the war on terrorism;" and he fears a reduction in the effectiveness of "the various institutions that have made it possible for public opinion to influence the actions of democratic governments." His focus is the civic rights of ordinary citizens rather than those of detainees, but the terms of his argument surely justify us in concluding that compromising the rights of detainees may be but one step towards compromising the rights of all.

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Content last updated: 07/07/2004

About the author

Lynda Morgan completed her Ph.D thesis on South African settler fiction at the School of Oriental and African Studies (the University of London), and her main literary interests continue to be in African literature and colonial/postcolonial studies. She publishes papers in these areas, and regularly contributes to national and international conferences. In August she will deliver a paper on South African and Australian settler fiction at the ICLA Congress in Hong Kong. She is also a published poet.