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January 21, 2005
There's a phrase in Polish for moments in history that were deliberately covered
up by the communist-era authorities: biale plamy, white or blank spots.
Instances of biale plamy include the killing of 22,000 Polish officers at
Katyn; by the Soviet Army in 1940 (an atrocity attributed to the Nazis for
nearly half a century) and the Soviet Union's role in crushing the Warsaw
Uprising against the Nazi occupation.
Since the fall of communism, Poland has been engaged in trying to fill in
those blank spots by creating the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN),
encouraging research by historians and writers, and fostering the rise of
organizations like the Warsaw-based Karta, which documents the recent history of
Poland and Eastern Europe. Impressively, Polish efforts have not been limited to
events involving Polish victims but also include those in which Poles themselves
committed violent acts, such as killings of Jews in Jedwabne and Lomza, and of
Ukrainians in the "Akcija Wisla;" ethnic cleansing campaign.
The Poles' truth-seeking efforts coincide with a worldwide trend toward moral
accounting. We live in the era of the truth commission, which attempts to
reclaim lost histories on behalf of those who have been silenced by murder.
There are, of course, certain cases where people argue against shining the light
of truth on the secret past, on the grounds it could disrupt a fragile peace.
Even then, however, it is hard to ignore the counter-argument—that leaving blank
spots in a people’s history serves the cause of impunity for torturers and
murderers.
Americans are fortunate to have independent organizations of the caliber of
the National Security Archives, dedicated to opening the culture of secrecy and
filling in our nation’s white spots. Yet by waging a "war on terror," are we in
danger of losing the values we place on transparency and truth-seeking? Through
isolation and invisibility, growing categories of people—the homeless, refugees,
illegal migrants, and now those labeled terrorists—have been made superfluous,
having no recognizable place in human society.
Ghost town, ghost train, ghost writer, and now "ghost detainees"—one of the
most chilling phrases to enter our language emerged from revelations about
torture at Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad and other sites. It refers to the CIA
detainees in Abu Ghraib who were not accounted for in the detention system and
therefore had no official existence. These individuals were deliberately placed
in a legal and bureaucratic limbo that is nearly impossible to penetrate; there
were therefore no limits on what can be done to them.
And what is even more troubling is that the existence of "ghost detainees" is
not a phenomenon of Abu Ghraib—where detainees of different status were
mixed-alone. The power of human language is such that it grants us the language
to identify a phenomenon which pre-dated the emergence of the phrase but which
we formerly lacked the words to use in identifying and discussing it. Even
before the use of this haunting sobriquet, the highly secretive system of
detention that has developed since the 9/11 attacks relied on turning detainees
without U.S. citizenship into near-ghosts. They are held sometimes in the main
detention center at Guantánamo Bay, sometimes in countries whose reputation for
torture is far worse than that of the United States; held sometimes with
charges, generally without; with access to lawyers and family members, mostly
not; occasionally released, most often not. There is no term on their detention.
Four prisoners now on trial in the first military tribunals since World War II
at Guantánamo can continue to be detained indefinitely, even in the unlikely
event that they are found not guilty.
White spots in the present, as well as in the past, represent a danger to the
moral basis of how we classify human beings, their place in the world, their
actions, and human suffering. The health of the American polity requires that
detainees, even dangerous ones, occupy recognizable human and legal categories.
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