Control or Closure at Guantanamo

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DANIEL SCHORR reporting:

From Guantanamo to Haditha, the administration's war against terrorism occasionally reveals some stark contradictions.

ROBERT SIEGEL host:

NPR senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

SCHORR: I am still trying to understand how a squad of U.S. marines could kill up to 24 civilians in Haditha, including women and children, and then claim they were following normal rules of military engagement. One wonders what kind of rules of engagement cover house to house shooting and hand grenades?

I am also having trouble understanding how the American command, having launched two 500 pounds bombs at Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bristled at the notion that he was killed by gunfire. We are told that American soldiers made every effort to administer medical assistance to keep him alive and he actually died while being transported on a stretcher.

Finally, and almost incomprehensible to me, the reaction to the hanging suicides of three inmates of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. Others have tried suicide by hanging and by hunger strike, but these were the first to succeed.

The camp commander, Real Admiral Harry Harris, took it as a personal offense. He said, the suicides were not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us. The inmates, he said, have no regard for life, either ours or their own.

What a peculiar reaction considering that some 460 inmates have been incarcerated for up to four years without trial, without hope, and when some went on hunger strikes, they were strapped into restraint chairs and force fed, and yet Admiral Harris has a point about asymmetrical warfare. A suicide with or without a bomb is the weapon that confers power on the powerless. These three suicides may accomplish what an international outcry has failed to accomplish, some changes and maybe the closing of Guantanamo.

As the struggle against terrorism drags on it becomes clear that this is not a war in any customary sense, but a series of engagements that make up their rules as they go along.

This is Daniel Schorr.

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