Selling Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America's Most Notorious Military Prison

2. Strange Consensus

21 2 Strange Consensus As the report of an investigation into the motives of a presidential administration for a major decision that is widely viewed as morally reprehensible, this book is akin to the report of an interrogation of a criminal suspect. Here the analogy is not to encounters where questioning is merely the excuse to inflict punishment. Instead the analogy is to encounters where an interrogator attempts to solve some puzzle involving the subject. Interrogators often question their subjects to develop a convincing narrative about motive that accounts for criminal behavior. Understanding the context in which the interrogation subject acted is essential for correctly interpreting that information. In the end, what makes an interrogator’s narrative superior to that of the interrogation subject is that it does a better job of accounting for motive. The problem facing the guilty interrogation subject is well known: every answer surrendered to an interrogator’s questioning risks exposure of some damning fact or logical contradiction in previous statements that causes the subject’s story to unravel. Veteran revolutionary Victor Serge advised fellow revolutionaries held in custody by the authorities to respond with silence or, if that was impossible, to respond with simple declarations affirming or denying responsibility. Once arrested , he recommended: Don’t be intimidated by the eternal threat: “You’ll pay for this!” What you’ll pay for is a confession, or a clumsy explanation, or falling for tricks and moments of panic; but whatever the 22 | The Official Explanation situation of the accused, a hermetically sealed defense, built on much silence and a few definite affirmations, or denials, can only help.1 Consistently offering the same brief answer is a strategy employed not only by criminal suspects but also by those who speak for governments . The steely discipline with which officials of the Bush administration repeated the official explanation for the Guantánamo decision is an example. Every generation in a liberal democracy learns through experience that claims made by public officials should be treated with a measure of skepticism. That remains true despite the contemporary sophistication with which information is consumed and easy access to alternative sources of news. Although once common, outright fabrications in public pronouncements have been replaced by sophisticated tools such as the redirection of attention through emphasis or omission and the dilution or subversion of meaning. Decoding sense and nonsense through the close reading and fact checking of statements issued by the government is an attractive analytic approach because it may reveal the concealed motivations of decision making. However, it has the drawback of potentially confining the scope of the interrogation to the categories of thought and perception found in such communications. The risk is that the unwary interrogator may end up endorsing, whether explicitly or implicitly, the narrative that is offered by the interrogation subject. That is how even the harshest critics of the decision ended up accepting all or part of the Bush administration ’s explanation. Again and again they made the mistake of analyzing the Guantánamo decision and its execution in isolation from other comparable events. Like the larger public discourse on the topic, their treatments were impoverished because they ignored the many historical precedents. In the chapters to follow, I show that, far from being unique, the Guantánamo decision and its execution followed a familiar arc of decisions by liberal democracies to intern special classes of prisoners , while the treatment of the Guantánamo prisoners is tragically similar to that in other asymmetric conflicts. These comparisons help to make sense of the many discrepancies of logic and fact surround- Strange Consensus | 23 ing Guantánamo that otherwise seem to be nothing more than the random noise of international and domestic American politics. In principle, the responsibility for detecting and denouncing deception perpetrated by elected and appointed public officials lies with the citizenry. In practice, real citizens are too uninformed, inattentive, and apathetic to perform that role with any consistency. Instead, that responsibility is borne by rival elected and appointed officials, activists, journalists, and academics. While criticism is the background noise of American politics, denunciation of wrongdoing is less common and depends on the detection of deception. Although there was plenty of criticism directed at the Guantánamo decision, it failed to develop into denunciation of the obvious wrongdoing. There was no scandal, because the deception was never detected. What is striking about the sizable literature of books and...