Is this what we have become..?

THE WORLD WATCHES AS U.S. AVOIDS THE SHAMEFUL GLARE

By Georgie Anne Geyer Fri Jun 17, 5:42 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- Last week I was in my hometown, Chicago, where I spoke with some of the famously political Daleys about the first mayor of the family, Mayor Richard J. Daley. One of the more colorful politicians of Chicago's Technicolor civic culture, he was given to voicing memorable words.


One of the family recalled the elder Mayor Daley's consistent opposition to the Vietnam War, a stance that was unusual in his time and certainly among his working-class constituents. The no-nonsense mayor told President Lyndon B. Johnson in no uncertain terms to get out: "When you're dealt a bad hand," Daley was quoted as saying, "get out of the game."

Those words seemed prophetic this week in the ongoing fight over the American prisoner-of-war camp at Guantanamo in Cuba. The rhetoric heated up, with Democratic Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois comparing the American treatment of prisoners to three of the world's most heinous dictatorships, and the administration remaining stubbornly fixed in its intention to stay the course there, perhaps forever.

But wouldn't it be better for the president and his team to take old Mayor Daley's prescient words (remembering that LBJ resigned over the war even before running for a second term)? Wouldn't it be better for the administration to cut its immediate losses on "Gitmo" and to realize that, as King Abdullah II of Jordan said in Chicago last week, the American abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are causing 98 percent of Arabs to be against us?

Surely it would, and one wishes they would hear the cries of genuine anger and revulsion at their actions and their rhetoric, not only around the world but certainly here at home.

We have enough to shame us: the sadism and masochism of the Americans in Abu Ghraib (for which only the lowest soldiers paid), the Koran mess at Guantanamo (the military keeps coming up with new figures on who abused the Koran, until it's almost grotesquely comical), and even the horrible beating to death of a clearly innocent Afghan at Bagram in
Afghanistan (reports afterward said his legs were "beaten to pulp" by American soldiers).

Guantanamo has become the moral symbol to the world of these depredations. Being on the island of Cuba, it had the status from the beginning of a kind of off-shore illegal and illegitimate den of iniquity. Is holding onto it really so important? Or is it just another of the obscene gestures of this administration toward not only the world, but toward the principles and institutions that historically have defined this country?

The United States has brought charges against only four of the 520 prisoners still held in Guantanamo. I, at least, am not clear on how many of the Gitmo prisoners have genuine cases against them, but we do know that from 80 percent to 90 percent of the Abu Ghraib prisoners are now declared to have been innocent men. We also know that this administration's obsession with the war on terror has led them to turn their backs on many of our most precious values: the rights of even prisoners under the law, the traditional American ban against torture, and our adherence to the Geneva Accords, which were originally hammered out to protect our own soldiers and to gradually introduce and enforce civilized norms of warfare to the rest of the world.

One revealing quote this week came from Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, a military lawyer assigned to defend a Yemeni national suspect in an American military commission process. "Instead of focusing on American values inherent to the Uniform Military Code of Justice, the ad hoc, on-the-fly military commission process rules focused on the lack of values of our enemy," he was quoted as saying. "That focus has caused the military commission to abandon the 'rule of law.'"

In truth, while the "discussion" on Guantanamo was raging in the Congress this week -- and while spokesmen for the attorney general were incredibly declaring that these Gitmo suspects could be "held in perpetuity" -- the questions that all Americans should be seriously debating were little heard.

The theory of the administration's
Justice Department -- that because the insurgents or terrorists are not connected to a country and government, they should not have any Geneva or other legal rights -- smacks of tribalism, of racism, of a total disregard for what the law really is. The idea that torture is A-OK so long as it ceases short of "organ failure" -- is that what America has come to?

Remember, in the beginning, this administration said the war would be over quickly and the Middle East would be saved; these set-asides of the law were temporary measures for "extraordinary times"; we'd soon return to our old selves. But this week shows that we're not returning to those old selves. To the contrary, the administration's corrupted ideas are becoming institutionalized, and Guantanamo is the living symbol of that change. That's why the eyes of the world are on Gitmo.