http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/americas-words-of-peace-a_b_3217088.html

 

David Bromwich

Professor of Literature at Yale

Like

230

America's Words of Peace and Acts of War

Posted: 05/05/2013 1:27 am

 

 

Is America at war with Islam? The question began to be asked when the first evidence emerged of the transfer of hundreds of innocent Muslims to Guantanamo and the despotic new order that permitted indefinite detention of suspects. The investigations in Iraq led by David Kay and Charles Duelfer established that our war against weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had actually torn apart a country empty of such weapons; and this was a second large piece of evidence to suggest that America was waging a war against Islam founded on prejudice and hostility. The racist treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and elsewhere gave additional point to the suspicions. Nothing, in fact, that George W. Bush ever said could be construed to signal a religious war. But all wars are an infernal machine in which the persons most infected with hate inevitably flourish and are promoted.
President Obama, immediately on being elected, took the largest conceivable step to prove the U.S. was not at war with Islam. On January 22, 2009, he ordered the closure of Guantanamo. "Some individuals," ran the text of his official directive,

currently detained at Guantánamo have been there for more than 6 years, and most have been detained for at least 4 years. In view of the significant concerns raised by these detentions, both within the United States and internationally, prompt and appropriate disposition of the individuals currently detained at Guantánamo and closure of the facilities in which they are detained would further the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.

So three paramount interests -- national security, foreign policy, and justice -- all would be served, according to the new president, by the closing of a prison whose name had become a by-word for torture and injustice and whose continued existence was a blot on the fame of the United States.