Too Close to Kafka for Comfort
Is there any convincing rebuttal to this powerful series of posts advocating for the release of the Uighur Muslims into the United States? What a shameful episode for America, and especially for the politicians who continue advocating an abhorrent position on this matter.
As long as I’m linking to Hilzoy, I’d also like to join her in decrying the idiocy of Harry Reid, who wins the prize for the most transparently dishonest and absurdly obfuscatory rhetoric of the year.
UPDATE: Just as I posted the above a Newt Gingrich column appeared in my e-mail in box. It asserts that Nancy Pelosi, a woman for whom I have no love, should step down as Speaker of the House. I’d care very little if she lost her seat in Congress, but I feel compelled to address a couple arguments from the column that are wanting.
Mr. Gingrich writes:
The case against Nancy Pelosi remaining Speaker of the House is as simple as it is devastating: The person who is No. 2 in line to be commander in chief can’t have contempt for the men and women who protect our nation. America can’t afford it.
To test how much damage Speaker Pelosi has done to the defense of our nation, ask yourself this: If you were a young man or woman just starting out today, would you put on a uniform or become an intelligence officer to defend America, knowing that tomorrow a politician like Nancy Pelosi could decide you were a criminal?
Would you?
As it happens, I decided against joining the Armed Forces and the CIA in the late 1990s, long before the reign of Speaker Pelosi began. Were I magically transported back to that time, however, I’d be far more put off by the fact that I’d one day be ordered to torture human beings whose guilt isn’t even established than any amount of contempt a future Speaker of the House might feel toward me.
Mr. Gingrich also writes:
If Nancy Pelosi believed that waterboarding was justified in 2002 – just like Porter Goss, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Tenet – then a policy of selectively using enhanced interrogation techniques in carefully circumscribed ways in order to prevent future attacks – in other words, the Bush Administration policy – is vindicated.
This is just too much. Whether or not Nancy Pelosi is a hypocrite or a political opportunist doesn’t say anything about the efficacy, legality, or morality of President Bush’s interrogation tactics! Though the dubious logic Mr. Gingrich employs here is a common enough flaw in Washington DC policy debates, it is astounding that on the specific issue of whether the United States is justified in brutalizing prisoners, so many politicians and pundits apparently believe that the posture one takes should be dictated by the behavior of political antagonists.
Shorter Newt Gingrich: Nancy Pelosi exhibits such poor judgment that she is unfit to be Speaker of the House, and on the matter of interrogation techniques, her judgment was the same as mine.
The reason lies in the precedent that would be set. For the foreseeable future, we will at times be detaining individuals that have traveled from states that torture and oppress to Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly Pakistan and elsewhere. Some of them will turn out not to have violent attentions towards us, though they may have violent intentions toward their home states. If every one of those mistaken detainees effectively has a right to a green card because they can’t be sent home, it will be impossible to have a detainment policy: at least some of these mistaken detainees will be radicalized and likely to eventually pose a danger to us after release within our borders, even if they don’t at the time of their detainment. A policy that can never make mistakes is a policy that can’t exist. The alternatives to detainment by us are a greater reliance on assassinations or on detainment by the security services of states in the region, the same ones that routinely torture.
— rd · May 20, 04:36 PM · #
RD,
The release of the Uighur Muslims into the United States wouldn’t set any binding precedent, a point that discredits your reasoning on its own.
Also, it is one thing to mistakenly detain someone, and quite another to mistakenly detain them for 7 years. The latter circumstance surely means that we owe them more than we would a detainee who we picked up, questioned, and released a day or even a month later.
And it seems to me that there aren’t a whole lot of innocent detainees who upon release couldn’t be sent back to their home country.
So on the whole I find your rebuttal quite unconvincing.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 20, 07:51 PM · #
Whether or not there’s a lot of purely innocent detainees, the problem of detaining individuals we later decide pose no direct threat is pervasive and will come up again in the future. Creating a situation where such individuals have in effect a right of residence in the U.S. because they can’t be sent to their repressive homelands would be disastrous. It’s not enough to say the Uighurs are different, you’d have to say why and how long we could hold someone before the new right of US residence kicks in. A hour? Two days? A month? A year? Finally, the Uighur situation is not one of pure detainment. They are free to go to any other country that will take them. The fact that none will is brutally hard, but the dilemma is created by our own refusal out of moral and legal principle to send them back to their country of origin. This marks a departure from past practice, as with the Russian prisoners in Germany after WWII, who were shipped back despite their well grounded fears of what Stalin would do to them.
— rd · May 20, 09:39 PM · #
Why do you persist in the fiction that if we let the Chinese Muslims settle in the United States, we are somehow binding ourselves to do the same in future circumstances? That is not the case. Nor is it the case that I have to define how long a detainee should be held before we’re morally compelled to offer them residence upon their release. I don’t know where to draw the line, but 5 years strikes me as obviously on one side of it.
Also, if detainees are found to pose no threat, why is it a disaster to allow the subset that have legitimate political asylum claims to settle in the United States?
Finally, you write that “the dilemma is created by our own refusal out of moral and legal principle to send them back to their country of origin.” The dilemma is also created by the fact that we created an incentive for bounty hunters to pick up innocent Muslims after 9/11, the fact that we had inadequate mechanisms for evaluating the guilt or innocence of those turned over to us, etc. That is why we have a moral responsibility to let them settle here — because we’re responsible for unjustly destroying their lives.
Of course, if we wait for the courts to reach the same conclusion I’ve come to, there really will be a precedent that binds our future actions. Unless we start behaving better, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
— Conor Friedersdorf · May 20, 11:11 PM · #