Drinking Blood

Frightened, angry, and feeling alienated by their government’s response to the Madrid terror attack, the Spanish people has voted decisively for a new government. Opinion polls showed that 90 percent of Spaniards had opposed last year’s Iraq war, but the previous government nevertheless firmly allied itself with the Bush administration. Now the Conservative government pays the price. And the Socialists should keep their promise to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq if the U.N. does not take control by June 30.

Hopefully, if it becomes clearer that this is indeed the work of al Qaeda, the new Spanish government will not make the same mistakes we have seen and suffered in the USA. According to an expression, war is politics by other means, but it has become domestic politics, all sound bites and image making. The idea that thousands of our detainees are terror-linked has been disproved, but our officials still make that claim. Just as Vice President Cheney has continued to make claims for Iraqi WMD, stockpiles, the true believers of the “war on terror” will continue to profit from the politics of fear.

Whoever they may be, terrorists understand this special politics very well, of course. This is not your polite sort of interfaith dialogue. “They (the non-Muslims) like life and we like Death” says the man in the “al Qaeda video”. Assuming it is genuine, how will non-Muslims understand this statement but the arrogant boasting of a religious nihilist? And how will Muslims understand it? Yes we should not be slaves to fear of death. But this sort of death-worship is not martyrdom. And especially, the slaughter of innocents cannot be rationalized away with a sura or a hadith taken out of context.

We can hope that there will be no massive immigration sweeps in Spain, no pattern of hate crimes, and no nightmare of special housing units and non combatant status. Some crackdown will take place. Certainly the new government will be expected to take effective action. Insha’Allah the innocent Moroccans, Indians or others will not be charged unfairly. We need to watch this. And, as New York area Muslims, we might also consider reaching out to Spanish media and mezquita alike, to express our sympathy at this time of sadness. Thanks to google and the internet, this is easily done.

Last week at Cooper Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights hosted an event with human rights defenders and the families of some of the Guantanamo detainees. It was good to meet these brave and suffering people, meeting in the same hall that abolitionist John Brown’s memorial service was held, and where Abraham Lincoln spoke. There is at last some glimmer of hope for the 650 left at Guantanamo, insha’Allah.

But the few Guantanamo detainees who have been released to Britain this past week—and set free with no evidence- told horror stories of mass death in shipping containers and beatings and death in Afghani prisons. The David Rose article in the Sunday March 14th Guardian is shocking, even to me. I have heard so many similar stories told to me in person, and even this past week there have been informed of serious beatings and inappropriate use of solitary confinement. But whether in US jails, or in military camps, the utter impunity of furious guards and new interrogation techniques belongs to the days of the soviet gulag and not to the land of the free and the brave.

Such thuggery and force may drive men to be submissive, but it does not result in real intelligence being known, even if there is any to be known. Telling each prisoner that the others had accused him –this may work to make someone paranoid, and some men may sign confessions, but it has been demonstrated that such confessions under duress are usually quite worthless. Unless, of course, interrogators are more interested in control than truth. Could our government prefer power to problem solving? Indeed, authoritarians need each other. In many ways, terrorism is good for business.

But many of the atrocities were perpetrated in Afghanistan, with the Muslim troops of General Dostum and others killing men only yards away from American special forces. Even journalists came through, looking for word of John-boy Walker Lindh and “oblivious to the suffering around them. In the Guardian interview freed detainee Shafiq Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that had been shot off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab who was missing half his jaw. For 10 days until his death he was screaming and crying continuously, begging to be killed.” His fellow detainee Asif Iqbal tells how he “had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened by thirst, he wiped the streaming walls with a cloth, and sucked out the moisture, until he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of the massacred prisoners. 'We were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We stank, we were covered in blood and the smell of death.'

War is hell—do we really want more if this? And if we really do follow that Urdu expression “better a clever enemy than a foolish friend”, no wonder we are in a state we are in as humans and as Muslims.