The illegal detention of prisoners at the naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba is one of several blemishes on the face of America’s international image. Many commentators have remarked on the shame George W. Bush’s concentration camps have brought to this nation – and they’re right. Many of these commentators have unfavorably compared Mr. Bush to his father who, they say, would never have allowed such violations of U.S. international law – and they’re wrong.
It isn’t often mentioned in the current debate – perhaps because doing so would be a backhanded admission that reporters failed to do their jobs 15 years ago – but our 41st president, George H.W. Bush, used Guantanamo Bay as a prison camp for people who were seized without due process of law and held, under brutal conditions with repeated violations of the civil right, for years without access to attorneys and courts.
If you’re over 30, some of this should begin to sound familiar. In September 1991, the democratically-elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted by a cabal of military officers. President Aristide, a former priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince, was brought to office on a tide of grassroots support from Haiti’s long-abused poor. Once in office, Mr. Aristide began shifting Haiti’s resources away from the military and toward enhancing health care and education.
His plan to raise the pitiful wages paid to Haitian workers earned the ire of American corporations, which used Haiti as a site for low-cost assembly of clothes and consumer goods. If Haiti was allowed to rise from banana republic to functioning democracy, Wal-Mart shoppers might have to pay an extra nickel for their gewgaws and other Latin American countries might catch on. This was clearly unacceptable, so the leaders of the Haitian military – several of whom were on the payroll of the CIA – ousted Mr. Aristide and began publicly executing his supporters in the streets. Fifteen hundred died in the six weeks following the coup.
Unsurprisingly, tens of thousands of people fled Haiti. These people were undoubtedly political refugees. After lifetimes of being ground beneath dictators’ heels, the Haitian people had stood up for their rights and enjoyed seven months of real democracy. Now it was over, the men with the guns were back and the United States, the great protector of the western hemisphere, was assiduously looking the other way – until the boats began launching.
The United States – after disastrously turning away so many Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust – had implemented a policy of giving shelter to political refugees. Now a fleet of such refugees was sailing away from Haiti, bound for Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida.
The first President Bush – now so praised for fidelity to the Constitution – had the U.S. Coast Guard seize the Haitians’ vessels on the high seas and bring them to Guantanamo Bay. There, the refugees were thrown into camps surrounded by barbed wire. Their boats and meager possessions were burned.
In the eight months following the Haitian coup, the U.S. detained 34,000 refugees at Guantanamo. Food, water and shelter were all in short supply. The people were penned behind fences, beaten by soldiers, set upon with guard dogs and injected with contraceptive drugs. Those infected with HIV/AIDS became unwilling participants in drug trials. Any of this sound familiar, from then or perhaps, more recently?
Rather than admit that the U.S. would turn its back on tens of thousands of political refugees, the first Bush administration labeled the Haitians “economic refugees,” ineligible for admission to the U.S. and ordered almost all of them sent back to Haiti, which meant prison or death for many.
U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Johnson declared the treatment of the Haitians unconstitutional and the Clinton administration closed the camp in June 1993.
The U.S. media and public, like the first Bush administration, turned its collective back on the Haitians in the early 90s because they were black, because they were poor, because their existence is – still – an uncomfortable reminder that our standard of living rests on the broken backs of millions to our south.
Today, civil libertarians in the U.S. can feel good about standing up for the rights of the men detained in Guantanamo, because we’re defending the rights of individuals we might not like or agree with. We should stand up for the rights of the people imprisoned in Guantanamo today, but we should have done it 15 years ago, too.
Now and Again
The illegal detention of prisoners at the naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba is one of several blemishes on the face of America’s international image. Many commentators have remarked on the shame George W. Bush’s concentration camps have brought to this nation – and they’re right. Many of these commentators have unfavorably compared Mr. Bush to his father who, they say, would never have allowed such violations of U.S. international law – and they’re wrong.
It isn’t often mentioned in the current debate – perhaps because doing so would be a backhanded admission that reporters failed to do their jobs 15 years ago – but our 41st president, George H.W. Bush, used Guantanamo Bay as a prison camp for people who were seized without due process of law and held, under brutal conditions with repeated violations of the civil right, for years without access to attorneys and courts.
If you’re over 30, some of this should begin to sound familiar. In September 1991, the democratically-elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted by a cabal of military officers. President Aristide, a former priest from the slums of Port-au-Prince, was brought to office on a tide of grassroots support from Haiti’s long-abused poor. Once in office, Mr. Aristide began shifting Haiti’s resources away from the military and toward enhancing health care and education.
His plan to raise the pitiful wages paid to Haitian workers earned the ire of American corporations, which used Haiti as a site for low-cost assembly of clothes and consumer goods. If Haiti was allowed to rise from banana republic to functioning democracy, Wal-Mart shoppers might have to pay an extra nickel for their gewgaws and other Latin American countries might catch on. This was clearly unacceptable, so the leaders of the Haitian military – several of whom were on the payroll of the CIA – ousted Mr. Aristide and began publicly executing his supporters in the streets. Fifteen hundred died in the six weeks following the coup.
Unsurprisingly, tens of thousands of people fled Haiti. These people were undoubtedly political refugees. After lifetimes of being ground beneath dictators’ heels, the Haitian people had stood up for their rights and enjoyed seven months of real democracy. Now it was over, the men with the guns were back and the United States, the great protector of the western hemisphere, was assiduously looking the other way – until the boats began launching.
The United States – after disastrously turning away so many Jews attempting to flee the Holocaust – had implemented a policy of giving shelter to political refugees. Now a fleet of such refugees was sailing away from Haiti, bound for Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida.
The first President Bush – now so praised for fidelity to the Constitution – had the U.S. Coast Guard seize the Haitians’ vessels on the high seas and bring them to Guantanamo Bay. There, the refugees were thrown into camps surrounded by barbed wire. Their boats and meager possessions were burned.
In the eight months following the Haitian coup, the U.S. detained 34,000 refugees at Guantanamo. Food, water and shelter were all in short supply. The people were penned behind fences, beaten by soldiers, set upon with guard dogs and injected with contraceptive drugs. Those infected with HIV/AIDS became unwilling participants in drug trials. Any of this sound familiar, from then or perhaps, more recently?
Rather than admit that the U.S. would turn its back on tens of thousands of political refugees, the first Bush administration labeled the Haitians “economic refugees,” ineligible for admission to the U.S. and ordered almost all of them sent back to Haiti, which meant prison or death for many.
U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Johnson declared the treatment of the Haitians unconstitutional and the Clinton administration closed the camp in June 1993.
The U.S. media and public, like the first Bush administration, turned its collective back on the Haitians in the early 90s because they were black, because they were poor, because their existence is – still – an uncomfortable reminder that our standard of living rests on the broken backs of millions to our south.
Today, civil libertarians in the U.S. can feel good about standing up for the rights of the men detained in Guantanamo, because we’re defending the rights of individuals we might not like or agree with. We should stand up for the rights of the people imprisoned in Guantanamo today, but we should have done it 15 years ago, too.
© Mark Floegel, 2006