The Guantánamo suicides and their impact on American political life

The deepening moral divide in the country cannot be papered over. While US military and Bush administration officials respond with brutal and callous comments, and the media and the Democrats react either with sophistry or silence, a growing portion of the American population is horrified by what is being done in its name. Many now simply choose to avert their eyes. But this revulsion will, sooner rather than later, find political expression.

The war in Iraq will go on and on and the situation will continue to deteriorate. More than three years after the invasion and occupation, and the boastful pronouncement “mission accomplished,” more than 70,000 US and Iraqi troops began an operation Wednesday aimed at “securing Baghdad”!

The demoralization and brutalization of the US troops in Iraq, whose presence is almost universally hated, guarantees further and worse Hadithas. The demonized Zarqawi will be replaced by another devil incarnate, whose name will be dutifully broadcast to a bewildered and increasingly alienated American public. Even if the Guantánamo gulag were to be closed down, the illegal detention and abuse would begin anew at some other camp. Meanwhile, the CIA will continue to operate the secret torture prisons it has established around the world.

With each new action, the regime in Washington reveals its gangster-like character. The US is widely viewed around the world as an outlaw state that simply does what it pleases. Recent poll numbers indicate growing international disgust and suspicion of official American conduct, even as US foreign policy appears increasingly disoriented, vindictive and irrational. Behind the evident madness, however, there is a perspective, even if a demented one: the drive of the American corporate and financial elite for global hegemony.

The comments of the administration and its supporters following the Guantánamo deaths are of a piece. The suicides of broken men, who believed after four years of utter isolation they would be condemned to live like caged animals in perpetuity, were greeted with these infamous words by Guantánamo base commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris: “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/guan-j15.shtml