5.
October Singapore
Singapore used to be a hub of the British Empire. The Raffles Hotel where the colonialists stayed and other buildings of colonial times are dwarfed by the modern skyscrapers of the banking center of Singapore. There are no graffiti in Singapore. It is ruled autocratically. A sign at the airport informs arriving passengers that drug traffickers are punished by death. The city state of Singapore is a secure friend of ours.

October Melbourne, Australia

The morning paper reported the preparations for the visit of President Bush in Canberra, the capital of Australia. A tiny satirical drawing inserted in the text caught my eye. The picture was divided diagonally. The upper left half was filled with tiny soldiers, guns ready, the lower right half contained two just as tiny hapless figures, perhaps father and son. The caption read: "You cannot see the leader of the free world, but you can see Mr. Hu." The visit by Mr. Hu, the President of China, was also expected in Canberra. The paper compared the preparations: Hu would come on an Air China plane with an entourage of 60 other Chinese. George W. Bush would arrive on Air Force One, accompanied by fighter planes of the Royal Australian Air Force. There would be five more American planes carrying an entourage of 656. While President Hu had planned a press conference, Bush had not. Hu was to stay three days and visit other Australian cities, Bush would spend 21 hours in Australia.

The next day Bush arrived and addressed a session of the Australian parliament. A representative of the Green party called out to Bush after his speech and demanded justice for an Australian prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay. When his intercession was ruled out of order by the Speaker of Parliament, Bush reacted by claiming: "I love free speech." But his remark was overshadowed by a scene when Bush left the house. A senator, also from the Green party, tried to hand Bush a petition on behalf of the Australian in Guantanamo. A representative of the National Party, part of the governing majority, pulled the petitioner back. This comical scene was several times replayed on television that night. Another representative of the Green Party had used his privilege of inviting one visitor to the gallery for the wife of the Guantamo prisoner. She, too, asked for justice for her husband in the television newscasts of the day.

Australians were well informed about what happened and is still happening at Guantanamo Bay, and so was I, by a report of the fiercely independent BBC. I learned more from this report than I had from reading our newspapers back home. The BBC reporters went to Afghanistan to find out from discharged former prisoners what went on at the Cuban base. Information is dragged out of the prisoners by a system of rewards. Such a system may avoid direct physical torture, but it will work only if the starting point is extreme deprivation. Moreover, the BBC-report mentioned that one prisoner had died from blunt blows. An investigation was still going on while the reporters investigated. It is known, also to American readers of newspapers, that there were several suicide attempts among the prisoners. The BBC-report showed American soldiers on Guantanamo answering questions. Enlisted soldiers spoke in bland clichés, an information officer in vague evasions. Watching them it was difficult to be proud of our armed forces.

Guantanamo Bay was chosen as a location for a prisoners camp because it is not on American soil and thus American courts have no power over it. Our constitution does not apply. But it applies to our soldiers there.

I do not want to argue against this line of thought at length; it is too obviously hollow. America leased the land of Guantanamo Bay from Cuba in perpetuity at a time when Cuba was a satellite country dependent on the power of the big neighbour. Cuba in practice was an American colony. The lease forced on Cuba was a colonial act. What we are doing there now is a continuation of the colonialism of the 19^th century. Worse still, the incarcerated human beings are without rights. Their legal situation resembles that of the prisoners of the Gulag of the Soviet Union or the inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. No, their situation is not the same in every respect, Guantanamo is not a death camp. But in a legal respect it is. The German SS took the trouble of declaring its Jewish prisoners stateless before shipping them to the death camps. This was an action without meaning, as hollow as the argument that Guantanamo Bay makes a non-American person a rightless one. I am not saying that the United States is like Nazi Germany. As a former German, whitewashing German crimes is not my intention. But I will say that there are developments in that direction, developments to which I am perhaps more sensitive than are native-born Americans.

I have a special relation to the holocaust because I was a German before I became an American and because I have Jewish friends who escaped. These cherished friends had been declared enemies of the German people and were destined to be killed. For that reason I know better than most of my American fellow citizens how wrong it is to declare human beings worthless enemies.

Not only Jews, Germans also lost their rights under the Nazis. German power was considered to be of a higher order than were individual rights. But there is a relationship between the external power of a state and its willingness to protect the rights of individuals. Since Nazi-Germany had no such willingness it was hated throughout the world. Being the object of general hate throughout the world, the Nazis could never win their war. Eventually the resources of the rest of the world would prove superior.