Cages Where Sick Babies Sleep on the Floor

There's a weird familiarity I feel with regards to the recent argument over whether the term "concentration camps" should be used regarding the detention centers where the US government is currently holding undocumented migrants. It's not that long ago, really, that former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was raked over for disputing whether "cages" was the right term for the wire holding pens in which children were being kept. 

But leaving aside the semantics of "dog pound" and "freezer" and all that, the facts are, themselves, very grim. There are children without their parents in filthy, miserable conditions, being asked to watch after younger, more miserable children.  Conditions that children (and adults) are being held in are ideal for the spread of disease and the potential for preventable deaths.  The family separations, and even the process of reuniting families are handled indifferently with shitty logistics and negligence bordering on the insane. Whatever one might prefer to call the conditions under which human beings are being kept, they are inhumane. 

And yes, despite what no less an expert on inhumane activity as Rep. Liz Cheney is might claim, it is very reasonable to call these shelters "concentration camps."

The messengers, here, are part of the problem for me, too--this is where the familiarity really sets in. It wasn't that long ago that Liz Cheney was extolling the virtues of what she would call "enhanced interrogation" techniques, and simple bloggers like myself would call "torture", with its embrace of tactics like "stress positions" and "rectal feeding."  Euphemizing horrible things to try to make them palatable is. itself, a form of abuse. It's gaslighting. It's telling all of us that our eyes and ears and minds aren't working right--that we are crazy for thinking there is something seriously wrong with seeing a problem with cages where sick babies sleep, or try to, on the floor, or that a system that hides the deaths among its inmates is trying to minimize its violence, or that is staffed with people who use dehumanizing language is unable to humanely deal with a humanitarian crisis.

What I can see is that when the Trump Administration argues that soap and toothpaste and bedding are too much to provide detained children, we are seeing people who have no concept of duty of care regarding their fellow human beings--even the smallest and least offending among us. And while it is true that facilities are overwhelmed, how can it be that this much is not viewed as inhumane--when it is asked of children that they rest on the concrete on as much space as a severely overcrowded area affords (sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture) and somehow stay healthy when little basic hygiene exists?  When people are denied their reproductive rights for political reasons?

The US is housing migrants now where we once kept Japanese-American citizens during WWII. The Trump Administration has also considered keeping migrants at Guantanamo Bay.  The number of migrants coming to seek asylum or work or anything else here has not abated because of the administration's deterrence approach, and the decision to cut aid to Central America only seems likely to make things worse.  (And I'm not saying the Obama Administration had superb answers about what to do with detained migrants and asylees either--they deported at a greater rate than currently, conditions in facilities were also not ideal.)

The argument over whether to call the facilities "concentration camps" just seems to be one of throwing words at a physical and immanent issue. There are some people who can be moved by words. The people who most need to be, will perhaps already be beyond shame.  And have been for a long time.

It is useful, however, to see who falls into which group.

See What Obama Has Meant?

So, here are some news stories that matter a lot, and in the course of the 2016 election stuff, I might not have given them each the attention they deserve--but here goes:

Eric Fanning, a gay man, has been confirmed by the US Senate for the position of Secretary of the Army.  DADT was only ended in President Obama's first term. His hold for several months was not due to his orientation, but because a Republican Senator wanted assurances that Guantanamo prisoners would not be transferred to a certain US facility. In other news, the GOP is really the reason why we never closed GITMO. We would have GITMO squared under any GOP president.

Obamacare has been a success, reducing the percentage of US uninsured to single digits.  We could do better, especially if states (all with Republican governors, by the way) all accepted the Medicare expansion to cover some of the poorest and sickest. Obamacare would be under the gun in the first term of a Republican President.  Hillary Clinton would like to build on this success with a Medicare buy-in program.  This is a really great idea.

The Obama Administration has doubled the salary threshold of workers who benefit from the overtime rule, meaning more middle/working class people get compensated for the hours they work. The Obama Administration has supported fair pay, higher minimum wage, and decent working conditions. Hillary Clinton will do the same. You are not getting that assurance from Donald "wages are too high" Trump no matter what the hell he says.

In just a day, the news stories remind us of what significant things President Obama has been doing, and still does, even in what should be considered the "lame duck" period of his administration. These are meaningful things to real people. They aren't "paper" signifiers.

Voting matters, and who gets hold of an office matters. And a President needs a sympathetic Congress to get his larger agenda through. It bears repeating and rinsing and repeating. It really matters. A lot. There is no "principle" respected by sitting the election out that compares to the damage that gets done when people don't aim to at least prevent harm, if not root for an active good. So that's where I stand.

GTMO, Drones, and the End of AUMF

As a blogger, I'm about as aware of my limitations as I could ever hope to be.  I just have deep feelings about certain things, and I get that that my typing about them isn't a whole lot more than a message in a bottle. I've been chewing over President Obama's speech from the other day because it expresses, as near as I can tell, an intent to break with the big, primal error of the War on Terror: treating it like a war on terror. The decision to fight terrorism and terrorists any time and any place was perhaps the fuzziest notion imaginable. It was a scattershot reaction born out of fear from people who seemed to have realized all at once that the world is a dangerous place and wanted to wage war on all of the danger--even if that meant turning the world into a battlefield. It was a reaction to stateless violence that borrowed from the worst of wars between known quantities. As a result, it entered a kind of unknown territory regarding odd concepts like "enemy combatants" and all that. There is no rank or serial number for these "enemies". They are, basically, criminals of a particular class.

If we took prisoners of soldiers on behalf of an army of a given state, there is absolutely codification of how they are to be treated, and it would be hard not to send them back to their own nations once hostilities had ended. The prisoners at GTMO aren't like that. (For that matter, our "hostilities" aren't like that either--with nations or with possibility of being "ended".) Their home countries may not want them, or might want them and mean to do rather bad things to them. If they were prisoners due to identifiable crimes of the conventional sort, would could try and sentence them through simple due process according to the way we would any prisoner charged with a crime. These people aren't really that, either. In some cases, these prisoners aren't charges with anything in particular because we don't really have straight stories on why they are all there (although that link is four years old, I would wager that it's still true if they haven't tried to try some of them--and I really don't have a lot of patience for the idea that someone who has not had contact with the outside world for 5-10 years still can produce actionable intelligence.)

I think there is good reason to consider this monumental legal cock-up that has put these people into a living limbo the fault of the previous administration and their half-baked philosophy about ends and means. It is quite definitely a problem the Obama Administration knew about going in, and one that the current players had years before taking office to think about.  I can easily place some blame on the political cowardice of our congresscritters, who have given in to a theory of the particular, almost "superinhumanity" conferred upon those who have been labelled "terrorists" and have preferred to keep these people in lockdown rather than have to juggle a hot potato while the "The only good Muslim..." crowd fires arrows at it.   But I would far rather feel like I had some guarantee that the Obama Administration had a solution in the pipeline.

If they must be the only grownups, then fuck it. It is up to them to figure out what the grownup thing is.

The repeal of the AUMF, however is putting the primal error back in the hands of the same sort of moral jerkoffs who failed to restrain the GWOT in the first damn place. It's asking them to please not let President Obama be C-in-C of a limitless war so he doesn't have to also have limitless responsibility for it. How do you make yourself have less power so you aren't obliged to use it, whilst still having room to do what absolutely must be done in a case where acting prevents greater harm?

I'm not saying I have the ideal plan--although I think, unlike any thing congress has had fuck-all success at doing, maybe political pressure to do right on this could be borne. If only we had activists who had good aim. And arguments that didn't sound like "Wharrrgarble!" And more like--"This isn't helping". And "This is actively causing harm".

Regarding drones, I think the same bind is in place. We need to work out a lawful solution. The status quo has been lazy and not-brave, regardless of how "successful" at bagging al-Qaida it has been--and its ease of use has lots to do with how neatly it avoids all the legal wrangle.  That avoidance needs to stop. We need to treat "terrorists" like grubby-ass criminals, and their groups like gangs. We need to dispell some of the myths that make a GTMO possible, or drones a preventive tool.  I hate to say that's a bully-pulpit job. But it's Obama's second-term, so what else has he got it for?

I counted, and this is not my change--Gitmo? Please!

I just now noticed this thing at TPM, even though I heard about it::

The draft order, a version of which was first considered nearly 18 months ago, is expected to be signed by President Obama early in the New Year. The order allows for the possibility that detainees from countries like Yemen might be released if circumstances there change.

But the order establishes indefinite detention as a long-term Obama administration policy and makes clear that the White House alone will manage a review process for those it chooses to hold without charge or trial.

George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent

From The Times (UK):

Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.

He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.

Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”

He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.

The Cheneys would maintain, of course, that the people still at Guantanamo are still the "worst of the worst" and it would be impossible to try them or even hold them in the mainland US. But it's not too diffucult to recognize that the Bush/Cheney administration swept people up in great numbers to make it look like there was a great threat, and then held them because they never had any forethought regarding giving them due process.

That would probably be why Liz Cheney yammers on to this day that the foreign or enemy combatants don't have the same Constitutional rights as US citizens. Which may even be, but they do have protections under the Geneva conventions. And even our most dire enemies, such as the Nazis, got military tribunals. So?* as Mr. Cheney might say.

But the point is, we can't establish guilt or innocence without a trial--this isn't Wonderland, where the Red Queen can just cry "Off with their heads" without a trial. It strikes me as inhumane and injust.

*So! Holding innocent people doesn't make us more safe, but it should make everyone in the US just feel a bit less safe because there is a precedent for the government deciding to lock people up and throw away the key. Also, the Iraq war wouldn't have happened but for its being associated with the terrorism of 9/11 and the greater war on terror. So! When do we look at Cheney, who got bids for Halliburton to all kinds of things, including building a new facility at Gitmo-- as being more than unusually self-interested, that being his old company and all?

*shrug*