Beyond Gitmo, etc.

In a sp!ked column on the Newsweek controversy, Brendan O'Neill seeks to "highlight a problem with the public debate about Guantanamo: it seems that some journalists, lawyers and campaigners are less interested in analysing, much less critiquing, the 'war on terror' than in speculating about what dodgy and degrading things might be taking place behind closed cages in Camp X-Ray."

He elaborates:

...these attacks on Guantanamo do nothing whatever to challenge American and British military intervention in Afghanistan, which created Guantanamo, or elsewhere in the continuing 'war on terror'. Just as challenging political leaders over the legality of the Iraq war is not the same thing as challenging them over the Iraq war, so debating the prisoner-of-war camp created by the 'war on terror' is not the same thing as challenging the 'war on terror'. We could do worse than recall what twentieth-century Hungarian thinker Georg Lukacs said of opportunism, 'which begins always with effects and not causes, parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself.'

It is time to stop obsessing over alleged mistreatments in Guantanamo and focus instead on 'the thing itself' - the problem of Western intervention abroad.

In a related piece that takes up the issue of the Newsweek scandal along with the recent Galloway firestorm in the Senate, William Rivers Pitt can't help but note the absurdity of it all:

It takes an irate Scot to play the role of the dogged opposition in the U.S. Senate, and it takes a Newsweek article by the guy who got Clinton impeached to ruin America's reputation in a Muslim world reeling from invasions, torture, rape and murder. Yes, you almost have to laugh. It's either that, or start breaking things.

That's a 'yeppers' on both articles.