REVENGE

by Kevin Carey

G21 Staff Writer

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Kevin Carey

KEVIN CAREY tries to explain the mutual incomprehension between Europe and the United States over the treatment of Afghanistan captives and warns that the enjoyment of revenge may be sweet but it will certainly be short.

SUSSEX, ENGLAND - There is an unwritten law of 7/24 media coverage that the more intractable the problem the more welcome it is. Problems with answers have short screen lives whereas a really difficult problem allows any number of academics, politicians, and nutters to expatiate, blather and rant, as is their respective wont, all day and night but preferably all night when there is a large gap to fill. If such a question cannot easily be contrived then the next best thing is a relatively easy question where the answer is withheld, shall we say, out of a sense of playfulness.

Such is the case of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War. It would be so much easier if their clauses could be put onto the screen for our unhurried and careful perusal. Such being the case, we would find that, regardless of a formal declaration of war, all those captured in Afghanistan by 'Coalition' forces are deemed to be prisoners of war unless and until an open, customary process of law is utilised to determine otherwise. Even if President Bush had not foolishly declared a "War" on terrorism which makes the Conventions' interpretation even clearer than it otherwise might be, the Al Qaida/Taliban captives at Guantanamo Bay are Prisoners of War. End of story.

But the Taliban know nothing of the ways of Tommy Atkins. As President Bush, most of his fellow countrymen, and a good many highly distinguished, humane, Pro-Geneva-Conventions, international lawyers in Europe all believe that, far from being POWs, most of the captives in Cuba are actually international criminals, the President would save much hand-wringing on both sides of the Atlantic if he were to precipitate legal action in that direction.

Delay has created two related false positions: the first, that liberals and humanitarians are sympathetic to the captives' cause; the second, that Europe is equally sympathetic. Those newspapers that urged the bombing of Afghanistan now urge clemency for the captives. This is nothing so geometrical as changing sides; most harlots with only two clients would be poor indeed.

Having got the legal side out of the way with reasonable despatch, we might take a quick look at what we know of the treatment of the suspects.

The chief cause of incomprehension between Europe and the United States arises because of our almost total failure to grasp the daily brutality of the American criminal justice system which, much more overtly than ours, is based on the primacy of revenge over such other considerations as deterrence, crime reduction or rehabilitation.

My wife has seen hundreds of black youths crammed into cages in Illinois County gaols and so, almost unique in our wide circle of acquaintance, she is not shocked that the Afghanistan captives are in cages. Almost everyone else believes that these Guantanamo cages are uniquely cruel, that shackles were abolished after a particularly vigorous campaign against them by Charles Dickens and that, therefore, these captives are being peculiarly badly treated.

There is a strange irony here, the irony of the restless liberal as well as the restless television advertising executive, that particular wrath over these captives will not generate a more general wrath against a 'three strikes' policy in such states as California which sentences people to life for stealing a slice of pizza.

Even before the crowningly insensitive statement of Donald Rumsfeld that he did not care how the captives were being treated, one of our more waggish current affairs programmes was featuring a weekly sound bite from him and held a competition at the year's end for the best one. ( I suggest you visit www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/broadcastinghouse. )

What we cannot stand over here is the candour.

• We think that the "War" such as it was, is over.
• We think that the only way to defend justice is to uphold it amongst ourselves and we think that,
• on reflection, there were such terrible flaws in the Afghanistan project that it had better not have taken place.

The first of these notions might be technically correct but I would not put a dime on an atrocity-free 2002. The second is pious to a degree, the strong having always imposed their kind of notional morality on the weak without any pretence of upholding it themselves. The third is pious in a different way, expecting politicians to behave in a morally consistent and upright fashion when the external environment which often threatens to overwhelm them is neither of these things.

A highly respected theologian and holy man has written that any campaign which assumed that there would be civilian casualties must be morally flawed. True; but if any party threatened war but said it would not endanger any civilian casualties, the enemy would simply have to force children to cohabit with soldiers in their barracks and on campaign and the game would be lost. One of the strangely touching qualities of the Taliban is that they were never unscrupulous enough for that kind of device which is second nature to Saddam Hussein. What moralists seem not to recognise is that turning the other cheek is a quintessentially individual moral response, it cannot be representational.

Nonetheless, the damage would not be so great if it were not obvious that Washington has stopped caring what American liberals or European allies think. Against our pieties it has gone as near to the public approbation of revenge as any 'Western' government dare go. Anything we have gained for our participation in Afghanistan must have either been granted in secret or must have been the withdrawal of a threat never publicly articulated; for we have seen nothing.

We should, in other words, be grateful that there are a few hundred captives and a mystery surrounding the existence of Bin Laden. Really serious damage will now be difficult to avoid. European Leaders might rue the fact that the United States scorned the newly established International Court of Criminal Justice but they are hardly likely to say so; and the United States might regret its error if it knew it had committed one. Matters are so grave that any proposal to update the Geneva Conventions to take account of the contemporary entanglement of war and terrorism would now sound like a piece of subterfuge, an attempt at post hoc justification.

Why fuss? After all, there was, in reality, no grand coalition nor great campaign.

To put the captives through secret military 'legal' proceedings will damage the United States seriously but it will hardly care. If the captives are tried using the normal, open judicial procedures available to United States citizens there is hardly a case where the evidence will stand up. The spectacle of multiple acquittals will hardly be popular and so, for pragmatic reasons, the Bush administration would be better to support the establishment of an ad hoc international tribunal and blame it for the fiasco.

On the other hand, such acceptance as this might make it more difficult for future enemies to kidnap and torture American combatants. The horror of the current position seems not to have penetrated the Pentagon, as if nothing had been learned either from the capture of the Iranian hostages or events in the Lebanon. There will be more kidnappings and hostages, planes that accidentally fall out of the sky, academics that are dispensable. If only for reciprocal considerations the United States should give way to international jurisdiction, otherwise its citizens, combatant or not, will be imprisoned, poorly treated and tried in secret.

Of all the enjoyment of all the vices, vengefulness may well be the sweetest but it is certainly the shortest.

KEVIN CAREY is social entrepreneur, economist and Director of the UK's humanITy. He can be reached via e-mail at "humanity@atlas.co.uk".

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