Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

G-U-A-N-T-A-N-A-M-O

Once upon a time, the U.S. government criticized other nations for human rights abuses from a pedestal of moral superiority.

That was before the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, revelations of secret prisons and the outsourcing of interrogations to regimes known for getting detainees to talk by pulling out their toenails. It’s the notorious Guantanamo prison camp, however, that really appears to be digging into the Bush administration’s moral high ground.

Here in the Arab world, the melodic-sounding Spanish name is spewed like an expletive or served up as a punch line. In one popular Arabic music video, the singer Shams is dressed in a slinky black gown and lounges atop huge block letters that look like the landmark Hollywood sign. But these letters spell out G-U-A-N-T-A-N-A-M-O. The backdrop is the White House.

“Well, what about Guantanamo?” has become the pat response when Middle Eastern dictatorships and dynasties are called out by U.S. officials for intimidating dissidents, cracking down on Islamists and doling out open-ended jail terms to men who are never charged with a crime.

Even Egypt, a staunch U.S. ally and a popular destination for rendition cases, invoked the G-word this week when President Bush publicly chided Cairo for locking up a prominent pro-reform activist.

“The U.S. President should have talked about the prisoners of Guantanamo who are deprived of the simplest of legal defence guaranteed by all human rights conventions,” the Egyptian parliament’s foreign relations committee said in a statement.

Iran had a similar response Tuesday after coming under fire for rounding up Iranian-American intellectuals and accusing them of spying.

“Instead of giving useless advice, it is better for Americans to evaluate their own approach in secret prisons, bad behaviour and inhumane confrontation with prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib,” an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by a government news agency.

On the website for the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, which was blocked by the Bahraini government, a photo gallery shows the battered faces of victims of alleged brutalities by the state security forces. On the same site is an entire section devoted to Guantanamo, which a Bahraini activist described as an “ongoing humanitarian travesty.”

That kind of juxtaposition has left Middle Eastern human rights activists in a bind. On one hand, they welcome worldwide attention to the excesses of the region’s often brutal, authoritarian governments. On the other hand, it doesn’t much help their cause when the attention comes via the guy with the keys to Guantanamo.



http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/cairo/2007/06/guantanamo.html