Death. Carnage. War. Famine. Crimes Against Humanity. From Iraq to Uzbekistan to Burma, there are stories to be told, human beings who are suffering. But we, as a pampered people, would rather the media tell tales of Britney Spears, juicy celebrity gossip, sex scandals (real or invested), narcissistic self-help guides, bland human interest stories, and missing white girls. We think we can isolate ourselves from evil in the world and our responsibility to a common humanity, not just by shoring up borders and exacerbating a “them and us” mentality, but by simply refusing to even look. Just like Thomas, unless we see it, it’s not real. But unlike Thomas, we don’t even want to look. We can’t deal with the challenge. And the media is willing abrogate its public service responsibility to help us out (for more thoughts on the media, see here.)
Nowhere is this clearer than with the case of war and recent US foreign policy. The US media refuses to broadcast images of murder and mayhem in Iraq, especially if the US military is the perpetrator. It even will not show footage of returning coffins. Al Jazeera, a network that is willing to show such images, is not only despised by the US regime, but has actually been targeted in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and journalists have been killed by American forces. And then there is the treatment of captives, so-called “enemy combatants” in far away places, including Guantanamo and sundry CIA secret prisons scattered across the globe. Here are some wise words from Neal Katyal, the law professor who successfully represented the plaintiff in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case (ruling that detainees must be accorded the protection of Geneva Convention Common Article 3):
“For a long time now I have reflected on how my visits to Guantanamo fundamentally changed the way I thought about the Hamdan case. It was very hard to understand the stakes–human, moral, legal–until I actually saw Hamdan himself and the conditions in the camp. Far from being an abstract issue for a law professor, going there taught me that the issues in his case were devastatingly concrete–about the core of personhood and individual dignity. One reason why Guantanamo was chosen as the site of the camp, I think, is that it is very difficult for ordinary Americans and the media to see it or visit it. It is easy to swallow a government story about the people at Guantanamo being the “worst of the worst” if you cannot yourself behold them.”
Notice how Katyal, who I do not believe is Catholic, talks about personhood and human dignity. This is essential. Of course, it’s all out of sight, out of mind. Because we cannot relate to anything in that detention center, we can assuage our consciences by assuming that the prisoners somehow deserve it, that they are the “worst of the worst”. But that is not true. As has been documented, most of the detainees were not captured on any battlefield, but were handed over by unscrupulous Pakistani and Afghan warlords for profit. Fewer than 20 percent have ever been Al Qaeda members. But, you know, out of sight, out of mind. But these men too share our common humanity. We have let them down. We have let ourselves down.
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