U.S. Losing Propaganda War with Terrorists

An answer came Sunday from a videotape purporting to show Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahri, who said the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, "explains the truth about reforms and democracy that America alleges it wants to impose in our countries."

The United States government may be losing a battle for hearts and minds with the world’s most reviled terrorists, and the abuse of illegally imprisoned people at the Guantánamo naval base is part of the reason why.  The video, part of which was played on Arabic satellite channel Al-Jazeera, is billed as a new Al Qaeda statement and pointed out the camp as proof of the U.S. government’s malign intent. Human rights activists had long pointed to the credibility and public image risks of denying prisoners rights to liberty, due process, and freedom from harm.  In the first chapter of Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, published in 2004 by Chelsea Green Publishing and now on-line by Narco News, author Ellen Ray asked Ratner why U.S. citizens should care what their government was doing to foreigners at the interrogation camp.  The Center for Constitutional Rights president’s number two reason:

[O]ur treatment of these people, who are primarily Muslims and of Arabic ethnic origin, should be a cause of tremendous consternation because of the message it sends to the Muslim world.  Guantánamo has become iconic in the Arab and Muslim world; it stands for the United States doing wrong and abusing people.  If we want to live in a safe world, the message we should send is that we will treat people not like animals but like human beings.  Although we should be trying to lessen the anger toward the United States within the Muslim and Arab world, we are not doing that; we are, in fact, doing the opposite.

"It has been three years since the first group of Muslim prisoners were sent to Guantanamo prison," Zawahri said, according to the Reuters report on the video.  "One may ask why all this interest in Guantanamo when our countries are filled with a thousand Guantanamos under U.S. observation."

"It is because it exposes the truth of the reform and democracy that America claims it wants to spread in our countries," he said.  "The reform which emerges from U.S. prisons like Bagram, Kandahar, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and from the launch of cluster bombs and rockets, and [from] the appointment of the likes of [Afghanistan's President Hamid] Karzai and [Iraqi interim Prime Minister Iyad] Allawi."

"If you Western nations believe that these [cardboard] carton governments will protect you from our responses then you are deluded.  Your real security lies in cooperating with the Muslim nation on the basis of respect and ending aggression," said Zawahri in the broadcast excerpts.

"Your new crusader campaign will end, God willing, in defeat as did those that preceded it but after the deaths of tens of thousands, the destruction of your economy, and exposing you in the pages of history."

Anyone should have an advantage in a battle for public opinion with people who declare themselves negotiators for a global religion and who promise responses that will deny entire continents' security, but the Bush administration has charted a strategy of abandoning all moral highground that it has been given.  Torture and imprisonment without trial are icing on the cake of U.S.-led invasion, occupation, and threats against any country the U.S. chooses to target for an ever-shifting set of made-up reasons.

"It is obviously in the interest of the United States to make our country less hated among the peoples of the world - Muslims and others - and the way to do that is not to set up an obviously unfair system of kangaroo courts that try only Muslims," Ratner said in the book.  "We should have a fair and open system in which people can participate, in which people get a fair trial."