Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Excuse me, but did I hear right?

Did Jack Thomas, the first person to be convicted under Australia's new terrorism laws, tell ABC TV's Four Corners program that he met David Hicks at an Al Qaeda training camp?

And that he was a really nice guy?

Funny, then, how this is not mentioned in the Herald's coverage of the report, nor even in the ABC on-line coverage.

Phil Moffat: "I don’t believe you, CP, more like you lay awake at night dreaming of Halle Berry’s lunch box."

I'd like to be Halle Berry’s lunch box.

CP: “Hey! I lie awake worrying that Slobodan Milosevic might not have had a fair, unbiased, balanced hearing."

I don’t believe you, CP, more like you lay awake at night dreaming of Halle Berry’s lunch box. I do ;-)

So now it seems that Will Howard also grasps the underlying issue involved, which pertains to the linchpin of the West's continued participation in the ongoing great human debate.

C'mon, CP, etc. Just for once admit that if moral values and strictures apply to others, they also must apply to us.

We can't expect compliance of others for what we are unwilling to comply with ourselves. If we can't set an example worth following, the rest will follow the standard we do set, be it based on values, or based on expediency. If we follow the path of expediency, the rest of the world will simply laugh, saying, "If what applies to us doesn't apply to you, why should we comply with what disadvantages us?", and simply tell us where to jump. We can wave guns in their faces and drop as many cluster-bombs as we like from that point, henceforth trying to compel, rather than persuade through the discipline of reasoned argument and moral example, them to our needs or viewpoint, but as long as the disgruntled remnants remain, we remain in peril. For these will become always enemies we must now look out for, who could have remained as friends, had we practised what we preached.

And how can one live well without self respect, anyway?

By the way, Will, noted your intelligent if somewhat restrained comments re CSIRO, elsewhere.

Hi all. Just checking back in after being away a while. The Gitmo Bay topic is an interesting one, especially as we consider the principled defense of free expression in the context of the Prophet Muhammed cartoons. I have previously defended the right, though not the rudeness, of publishing those cartoons. In the West, in places like the USA, you have the right to be rude. That's what the Bill of Rights (in the US example) guarantees, and that's why the cartoons can be published, and why David Dukes and Justin Raimondo can each spew their respective stuff.

Similarly, David Hicks may be racist, deluded, anti-Semitic, and who knows what else. But those are not crimes. The same Bill of Rights that gives newspapers in the USA the right to print the cartoons, guarantees Hicks' legal rights. George Dubya doesn't get to pick and choose which amendments he wants to uphold and which he doesn't. He has taken an oath to uphold the whole Constitution. It's a package deal, unless he wants to amend it (an extremely laborious process). That means letting even jerks like Hicks go, if they can't be credibly charged with a crime.

If the Bush Admin really wanted to be true to American values, they would shut down that Guantanamo facility, charge the people there with crimes and put them on trial, or let them go.

An article in The New Yorker about the efforts of Alberto J. Mora, general counsel of the United States Navy, to get the US administration to follow the law:

The memo is a chronological account, submitted on July 7, 2004, to Vice Admiral Albert Church, who led a Pentagon investigation into abuses at the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It reveals that Mora’s criticisms of Administration policy were unequivocal, wide-ranging, and persistent. Well before the exposure of prisoner abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, in April, 2004, Mora warned his superiors at the Pentagon about the consequences of President Bush’s decision, in February, 2002, to circumvent the Geneva conventions, which prohibit both torture and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” He argued that a refusal to outlaw cruelty toward U.S.-held terrorist suspects was an implicit invitation to abuse. Mora also challenged the legal framework that the Bush Administration has constructed to justify an expansion of executive power, in matters ranging from interrogations to wiretapping. He described as “unlawful,” “dangerous,” and “erroneous” novel legal theories granting the President the right to authorize abuse. Mora warned that these precepts could leave U.S. personnel open to criminal prosecution.

Mora is no lefty terrorist sympathiser, having barely escaped from communist Cuba himself and was inside the Pentagon when the plane smashed into it.

From the time Alberto was a small boy, Klara Mora told me, he heard from his grandfather the message that “the law is sacred.” For the Moras, injustice and abuse were not merely theoretical concepts. One of Mora’s great-uncles had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp, and another was hanged after having been tortured. Mora’s first memory, as a young child, is of playing on the floor in his mother’s bedroom, and watching her crying as she listened to a report on the radio declaring that the 1956 anti-Communist uprising in Hungary had been crushed. “People who went through things like this tend to have very strong views about the rule of law, totalitarianism, and America,” Mora said.

It is quite a long article but worth the read, the nub being that rules were being rewritten without any legal or even moral stance.

A few days after his going-away party, he reflected on his tenure at the Pentagon. He felt that he had witnessed both a moral and a legal tragedy.

In Mora’s view, the Administration’s legal response to September 11th was flawed from the start, triggering a series of subsequent errors that were all but impossible to correct. “The determination that Geneva didn’t apply was a legal and policy mistake,” he told me. “But very few lawyers could argue to the contrary once the decision had been made.”

Mora went on, “It seemed odd to me that the actors weren’t more troubled by what they were doing.” Many Administration lawyers, he said, appeared to be unaware of history. “I wondered if they were even familiar with the Nuremberg trials—or with the laws of war, or with the Geneva conventions. They cut many of the experts on those areas out. The State Department wasn’t just on the back of the bus—it was left off the bus.” Mora understood that “people were afraid that more 9/11s would happen, so getting the information became the overriding objective. But there was a failure to look more broadly at the ramifications.

“These were enormously hardworking, patriotic individuals,” he said. “When you put together the pieces, it’s all so sad. To preserve flexibility, they were willing to throw away our values.”

I wonder if he will have any more fits of conscience with his new job at Walmart.

Andrew McCrae: "Apart from your absurd and irrelevant effort, supported by a link to Tim Blair's blog, of all things, to paint Hicks as a 'racist' on the basis of that line from a letter..."

Do you mean the letter in which Hicks tells his family his training in Pakistan and Afghanistan is designed to ensure 'the Western-Jewish domination is finished, so we live under Muslim law again'?

I have a little test for these things I call the 'Catholic litmus'.

To get some idea of the racist intensity of remarks like Hicks's 'Western-Jewish domination' admission, I substitute the word 'Catholic' for 'Muslim', and see how it sounds.

I can do this because I am a Catholic and we Catholics are also a religious minority with a fair claim to having been persecuted.

Now, let's replay Hicks' remark again mutatis mutandis;

Person X "tells his family his training in Croatia and San Salvador is designed to ensure 'the Western-Jewish domination is finished, so we live under Catholic law again'?"

Does that sound racist?

It does, doesn't it?

The Taliban, of course, aren't Catholics. They're Jew baiting reactionaries of breathtaking arrogance and brutality.

Now, Hicks actually volunteered to fight for those guys. To "ensure the Western-Jewish domination is finished".

Jewish domination? Of the West? Or the whole World? Who knows exactly.

Anyway, Andrew, can you see where I'm coming from when I suggest Hicks is a racist? I mean, quite apart from his handwritten admission?

Talking about "anti-Zionists" and the "wrongfully imprisoned", how priceless was the remark made by former Nazi propagandist and convicted liar David Irving when he stepped out of that Austrian court-room this morning, having been sentenced to three years gaol on pleading guilty to Holocaust denial?

To waiting television cameras, and without a hint of irony, he muttered something along the lines: "The Austrian legal system is like something from the Nazi era."

Brou ha ha ha ha ha ha!

He also now admits: "The Nazis did murder millions of Jews."

Upper class twit, and former Australian beauty queen Michele Renouf, praised Irving for "standing up to the Zionists".

She told reporters: "I am here to free David Irving and free Austria from this totalitarian law."

C Parsons, in a typically sarcastic reply to me, says:

Andrew McRae: "Strange, then, that CP isn't defending Hicks' right to a fair trial."

Oh, you've got me there, Andrew. Actually, I think he should have been tried within weeks of his arrest. Anyway, Hicks's trial was initially set for January 10, 2005, wasn't it?

Then what happened? Oh, that's right.

Hicks's trial was delayed in November 2004 when someone appealed to the US Federal Court for a ruling on whether Commissions were competent nor lawful.

and so on, blaming Hicks' team for the delay! 

C Parsons, you're claiming you thought Hicks should have had a prompt trial (were you doing so at the time of his detainment?), which doesn't mean a fair one. The original date set for the trial was still almost three years after his 'capture'. Why did it take so long? You've not invalidated my point at all.

This sort of sarcastic twaddle, replete with inane rhetorical questions...

Gee? What's causing all these appeals and delays in the trial process, I wonder?

Say? When he was soldiering for the Taliban, did he kill anyone?

Perhaps he should be repatriated to his adopted homeland for trial there.  Afghanistan, isn't it?

... isn't worth a crumpet.

There were many good reasons why Hicks' defence sought to postpone or even prevent a trial, not least that it was convinced it would not be 'fair'. Some of the things Hicks is alleged by prosecution to have said he claims were obtained under duress. The goings-on at Abu Ghraib suggest the Guantanamo pigs would have had few qualms about torture, especially as the whole establishment is more or less beyond scrutiny as well as the rule of law.

Your very first comment on this article included:

Moreover, rather than house racist mercenaries as inmates, GULAGs were far more likely to be guarded by them.

Apart from your absurd and irrelevant effort, supported by a link to Tim Blair's blog, of all things, to paint Hicks as a 'racist' on the basis of that line from a letter, you seem to have prejudged the prisoners in a grand generalisation. I don't believe any of the charges against Hicks were for being 'racist' or a 'mercenary'. Rather, he has been charged with being an 'unlawful combatant' (or 'unprivileged belligerent'). Wikipedia's entry on this contrivance has this to say:

An unlawful combatant (also enemy combatant or unprivileged combatant/belligerent) is a person who is accorded neither the rights a soldier would normally have under the laws of war, nor the civil rights a common criminal would normally have...

and... 

The treatment of "unlawful combatants" by the U.S. falls considerably short of the standards required under international humanitarian law. There are strong indications the Bush Administration’s policy of classification and detention of persons designated as "unlawful enemy combatants" is based on a presumption that the Geneva Conventions and Constitutional safeguards are an obstacle in the pursuit of the ‘war on terror’.

So, show us you really do believe in the concept of a 'fair trial', even for those you so obviously despise.

Mike Lyvers, you are right. I owe you an apology. heaven knows where I got the idea that you were Jay White.You must be mighty offended.

Mike Lyvers: "Perhaps the Western leaders did not like dealing with Lenin for this reason" (followed by link offered, with ( loaded?) info concerning various atrocities and purges conducted during the twentieth C).

You have obviously, incredibly even wilfully, missed my point in the post you were replying to, in which I proposed that Stalin need have only remained a "historical footnote" (if even that), had the West dealt honestly with Lenin; circa 1919-20 instead on the basis of prejudice?

Stalin came after Lenin, you dolt. His heyday was from the mid-twenties through 'thirties and 'forties, into the 'fifties, not just after WW1, when something could have and should have been done (except that then Western leaders may have had to acknowledge workers’ conditions in the West and its coolie-based colonial economies). The likes of Lenin (died early twenties), Trotsky and Bukharin, (purged by Stalin, later) were different people to Stalin altogether. Russia had collapsed due to the incredible ineptitude of the Romanov czars, leading to utter defeat in WW1 and these people sought to save Russia from the consequences of this.

Can I quote a real historian on this issue, Mike?

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes...1914-1991, p35, has the following to say:

What little chance the peace had (after 1918 ), was torpedoed by the refusal of the victor powers to reintegrate the losers. It is true... the total outlawing of... Soviet Russia soon proved impossible, but adjustment to reality was slow and reluctant... as for the USSR, the victor states would have preferred it not exist... backed the armies of counter revolution in the Russian Civil War and sent military forces... their businessmen even dismissed the offers of the most far-reaching concessions to foreign investors made by Lenin, desperate to... restart an economy almost destroyed by war.. and civil war. Soviet Russia was forced into developing in isolation.

Hence, the preconditions for Stalin!

I was talking about what could have been prevented, not endorsing it!

The West, by the way, also had chances to negotiate with Mao and Ho Chi Minh and with various leaders in the Mid-East later in the century which could have nipped later misunderstandings or tragedies in the bud, but on the basis of narrow-minded bias and ignorance, missed out taking practical action concerning these too. Instead we got CIA coups (Iran; Latin America) and decision-making and treaties based on greed or expediency, rather than ethics.

For heaven's sake, drop the Macarthyism and try to, at last, look at issues objectively. Or are you trying the same stunt the Howard Government has taken concerning CSIRO, and avoiding looking at issues on their merits, because of self-interest, or, out of false pride, it is "too hard"?

Can't you see? If governments deny people a fair trial and the rule of law, as with Hicks, cover up on serious issues, as has occurred with CSIRO’s comments on climate being censored and introduce bodgy surveillance/sedition laws, they have started down precisely the same road that Stalin followed!

C Parsons, the links I provided have already pointed out why Hicks is not a mercenary according to the legal definitions (and is less so than the "security advisors"). He doesn't meet the dictionary definition either.

one that serves merely for wages; especially: a soldier hired into foreign service

Our best information seems to be that he was, however misguided, serving for the cause (and perhaps the thrill). On your own arguments he is not a mercenary. You didn't mention the money at all.

I don't particularly want to dispute your assesment of Hicks as racist, although Bryan Law makes a good point. However I would like to know how he differs from those who rant, here and elsewhere, against "Islamofascists", and often Islam in general. Is it a technical distinction between race and religion? Or a matter of objective truth that Islam is, by nature, evil, and so the ranting is justified?

Perhaps Islam is not essentially evil but has been perverted (by the usual suspects) to evil ends. But the rants have been going in the other direction. Less "Islamofascist", more just "Islam".

If you leave out the "foreign service" clause, I'd say it's a fair bet that there are more racist mercenaries on the outside at GITMO than on the inside.

And this is all really beside the point. Should Hicks be properly charged or released? It hasn't happened yet - after four years. We know your opinion of him, but should he be subject to due legal process? I note your reponse to Michael de Angelos. You're not talking an eye for an eye, but it does seem to be nature, red in tooth and claw. The devil take the hindmost!

CP, forget for a moment (if you can) left and right. Should Hicks get a fair trial?

Paul Walter: "By the way, the great accomplishment of Stalinism was not the invention of the gulags, but the defeat of Nazi fascism in WW2: this saved us, too!

Well that just depends on which way you look at it. Although I would not be thanking Stalin for the defeat of Nazi Germany - more the Russian people and those of the Soviet Union. If for example you were one of those Soviet citizens unlucky enough to be there it may well have crossed your mind who would get you first Nazi Germany or Uncle Joe before and after.

"And had Western leaders like Churchill taken the chance to win over Lenin and the more moderate Bolshevik, instead of trying to further cripple the already-ravaged Russian state and its freezing, starving defeated people by way of supporting "White" warfare, thus creating the conditions condusive to the rise of Stalin, it is likely that he would never have been anything more than an obscure historical footnote".

Oh I see, a Western Government is to blame for all the ills of the Soviet Government under Stalin? Bit like if the Northern Alliance had not been out and about, Hicks would never never have been captured in the first place?

Perhaps the Western leaders did not like dealing with Lenin for this reason. Yep, sorry to burst the bubble however Lenin the "moderate" makes the worst genocide list of the 20th century not counting the dead through failed programs I might add.

I was under the impression, C Parsons, that Hicks had adopted Afghanistan as his homeland but maybe it's more misinformation. If he hadn't, and had chosen to fight for the Taliban - and I haven't to date heard anyone else claim he was a "mercenary", meaning a paid fighter for the Taliban, it changes nothing. If he was a soldier for the Taliban then he was obviously there with the approval of the legal government of Afghanistan no matter what you think of them.

Just as our soldiers are guarding Japanese workers in Iraq at the invitation of the US who have never asked the Iraqi people if they want foreign troops on their soil.

There is no way to spin this - as in so many outrageous acts since the elections of Bush, Blair and Howard. The law is simply something to be used as a political tool, flouted and denied whoever they chose to deny rights to.

I can just see the lunar right now bleating like crazy if others supported the incarceration without trial of political prisoners in the Lubianka in the old Soviet Union. For America to be doing this, where one of their most basic rights is to a speedy trial it's sheer hypocrisy. For Downer, Ruddock and Howard, of course, it's merely a matter of how high the Sheriff tells them to jump.

Even rednecks deserve justice and a timely trial. If Hicks was a Taliban mercenary, although I do not know what proof anyone has but it's been stated by family members he was a converted Muslim, the Taliban were the lawful government of Afghanistan who were overthrown by the US invasion.

The US is now using mercenaries in Iraq, another country they invaded. Perhaps Hicks should have called himself a "security adviser". Whatever one wants to dub him, it is illegal under the Geneva Convention, to which Australia, the USA and UK are signatories, to incarcerate indefinitely soldiers captured in foreign countries, particularly their own.

Spin it anyway they want, this is cruel and inhuman punishment for as yet unproven crimes. No wonder the SS and the Nazis had a free run for so long. Plenty now see no wrong in their tactics.

Mark Sergeant: "C Parsons, on what basis do you assert that the GITMO inmates are "racist mercenaries"? Is it all of them, or just some?"

Well, Mark, I was specifically thinking of David Hicks, who according even to his fellow inmates is a redneck.

Not surprising, really.

His credentials as a Taliban mercenary are certainly not in dispute.

From his training and fighting with the Islamic fundamentalist paramilitary group Lashkar-e-Toiba in Kashmir, David Hicks went to Afghanistan and joined the Taliban.

"Afghanistan is in the middle of a very, very heavy war in the north, no waiting here. I have arranged to go directly to the front…."

- David Hicks 

He joined theTaliban unit to fight against Australian and other Coalition forces and to give expression to his racist world view.

In his letters to his family, Hicks tells them his training in Pakistan and Afghanistan is designed to ensure "the Western-Jewish domination is finished, so we live under Muslim law again". He denounces the plots of the Jews to divide Muslims and make them think poorly of Osama bin Laden.

He is undoubtedly a racist, and a mercenary. Why even pretend otherwise?

But true, perhaps others with him inside Guantanamo aren't, so that's a point to you.

Paul Walter: "The issue, as seems to be recognised by all subsequent posters to you  is not Russia, circa 1939..."

Indeed, Paul.

So why does this article, titled 'Our Guantanamo gulag shame' expressly draw a parallel between Guantanamo Bay and the GULAG?

When as you admit there is none to be had?

Is it a cack-handled attempt at moral equivalence or something?

The UN has demanded closure of Gitmo.

A United Nations inquiry has called for the immediate closure of America's Guantanamo Bay detention centre and the prosecution of officers and politicians "up to the highest level" who are accused of torturing detainees.

The UN Human Rights Commission report, due to be published this week, concludes that Washington should put the 520 detainees on trial or release them.

It calls for the United States to halt all "practices amounting to torture", including the force-feeding of inmates who go on hunger strike...

The report wants the Bush administration to ensure that all allegations of torture are investigated by US criminal courts, and that "all perpetrators up to the highest level of military and political command are brought to justice".

It does not specify who it means by "political command" but logically this would include President George W Bush.

The Administration will probably ask Gonzalez his opinion of the matter as he is A-G. We already know his attitude to such matters. Do we expect "Little Sir Echoes" from our government.

Shameful indeed.

The issue is also mired in hypocrisy from the "they hate us for our values" rationale to the apologists' defence of the COW leaders against accusations of war crimes and such other breaches the evidence indicates. You know the one: "show me where there's been a court case".

Our government has failed in its duty to Australian citizens and thrown  principles and adherence to law and justice overboard.

So, WD's answer to Imre Salusinsky is at it again, like an unamusing, but equally infantile, version of Dennis the Menace.

The issue, as seems to be recognised by all subsequent posters to you  is not Russia, circa 1939, but the denial of the most basic right of all, a fair trial today, by a society that ambitiously declares a completely different manifest to Stalin's concerning inherent basic values involved, as inviolable and not negotiable. 

If you don't like the arbitrary nature of Stalinism and its seminal feature of illegal detention, why would you advocate the same for our society?

Because that's what Hicks is about.

But then, it's just like you to go grandstanding off-topic, to distract attention from the issue up for discussion, which is the implicit threat to both Hicks AND Western civilisation posed by illegal detention at GITMO.

By the way, the great accomplishment of Stalinism was not the invention of the gulags, but the defeat of Nazi fascism in WW2: this saved us, too! The gulags are a negating opposite and neither was Stalin the first or last leader in history to repress his people. If onlt I had a dollar for every historical name I could think involved in similar antics, starting with Sennacherib of Assyria...

And had Western leaders like Churchill taken the chance to win over Lenin and the more moderate Bolshevik, instead of trying to further cripple the already-ravaged Russian state and its freezing, starving defeated people by way of supporting "White" warfare, thus creating the conditions condusive to the rise of Stalin, it is likely that he would never have been anything more than an obscure historical footnote.

In the vernacular, most Australians could not give a rat's arse about Guantanamo. They don't give a rat's arse about Solon, Rau and others. They don't give a rat's arse about "babies overboard". They don't give a rat's arse about Iraqi wheat kickbacks. They don't give a rat's arse about government corruption and lies and gagging of public servants and scientists.

Our fellow citizens are mute on all morals. There is not an angry bone in their body. Howard knows it and he encourages it. It is the only way that a 33-year political hack can become a Prime Minister, because people just do not care who runs this country. This is the man whose highest expectation for Australians was that they feel "comfortable". He got his wish and they have him. Shall history record in a hundred years that this was Australia's finest hour?

Eventually the pendulum may swing back and inconvenient concepts such as truth, ministerial responsibility and being honourable may return. Just don't hold your breath.

As others say - whatever you think or believe about David Hicks, his incarceration without trial is absolutely appalling and should be condemned by our leaders. The possibility of him or any of the other illegally held prisoners getting a fair trial now is remote. The idea that America can invade Afghanistan and haul off Afghanis, Pakistanis, Britons and Australians and incarcerate them in some hell hole in Cuba makes a mockery of their claims to be democratizing the Middle East.

C Parsons, on what basis do you assert that the GITMO inmates are "racist mercenaries"? Is it all of them, or just some?

The mercenary ground has been covered before. In regard to Hicks, I have argued (at May 24, 2005 09:11 PM) that (according to UN conventions) he is probably not, and it is more likely that "security contractors" would be found to be mercenaries. You didn't respond then, but perhaps you would like to now.

There is a bit more detail here (at July 28, 2005 06:35 PM).

I'd recommend anyone contributing here review both of those threads. It may save us from going over all the same ground again.

CP, glad we got that Gulag thing cleared up.  Now, what do think about the issues raised in the article?

I don’t care whether Hicks is a racist mercenary or a naive soldier of fortune. I don’t care whether he’s innocent or guilty of attempted murder (the worst of the worst!). What I do care about is that our Government has sold him down the river and abandoned some pretty fundamental national values for the sake of blowing smoke up George Dubya’s arse. There is clearly no justice involved in Hick’s case, just as there was none for Habib.

The Government (Ruddock in particular) could barely contain their anger when Habib was released and have done everything possible to convict him in the media. But they won’t press any charges. The Government says they don’t have the legislation. When was this Government ever shy about retrospective legislation (remember Tampa? Rember the 15 Kurdish refugees?)

I believe Hicks was released from Guantanamo Bay because to try him, before a Military Tribunal that answers to the President of the United States, would have allowed him to blow the lid on the whole disgusting process of extraordinary rendition. (And let's face it, it doesn't look good to convict somebody on evidence obtained under torture, no matter how guilty the person might be.)

Of course, we now know all about extraordinary rendition. And as far as I can see our Government is complicit in it, which would make them complicit in the torture of Habib in Egypt. And in whatever Hicks endured.

I don’t think Habib or Hicks are saints. It’s not them but principles I’m defending. Howard is a spineless wimp for not standing up for the right to a fair trial for Australian citizens.  He’s a hypocrite who demeans all Australians. What kind of Government proudly claims principles and values that are abandoned the minute they’re politically inconvenient? One that is morally bankrupt.

First of all, I would like to point out that Guantanamo Bay is nothing like a GULAG.

The GULAGs housed millions of inmates who were used primarily for slave labour. These included men, women and children.

Moreover, GULAGs were in place through most of the history of the USSR.

In fact, they are possibly the greatest single "achievement" of the Soviet Socialist system, if you measure such things by the numbers of people involved.

In 1939 alone, the GULAGS had about 1.3 million people in camps and 350,000 in various colonies.

The total documentable deaths in the system of corrective-labor camps and colonies from 1930 to 1956 amount to 1,606,748, including political and common prisoners.

This does not include "counter revolutionaries" during the period of the "Great Terror", since they were mostly conducted outside the camp system and were accounted for separately.

So, your suggestion that Guantanamo Bay is a GULAG is palpably incorrect.

Moreover, rather than house racist mercenaries as inmates, GULAGs were far more likely to be guarded by them.