Thought for the Day, 18 June 2004

The Rt Rev. Richard Harries

Good morning. Mr Begg hasn’t heard from his son for months. When he has had a letter, it’s been heavily censored and taken ages to arrive. On Wednesday I was part of a small delegation to the Foreign Office supporting Mr Begg and the families of other British citizens still detained in Guantanamo Bay. After coming up to three years hundreds of people are still imprisoned there in a legal limbo with no rights. It is, I believe, quite unacceptable.

What is even more shocking however are the attitudes that have been revealed this week. On this programme the General in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said she was briefed by the General previously in charge of the detention regime in Guantanamo Bay to treat detainees like dogs. She reported the words “If you allow them to believe they are more than dogs then you will have lost control”.

If I had to choose one attitude more than any other that is totally contrary to the mind of Jesus, it would be the deliberate desire to humiliate other people. You may strongly disagree with someone – think that they are wrong, misguided, even evil. But systematically to demean others, as is revealed in the abuse of prisoners in the photos from Iraq for example, is to deface the image of God. Human beings are made in the divine image. Christ said that what we do to one another we do to him.

I don’t think we can simply blame a few misguided soldiers for acting contrary to honourable military traditions. How is it that they developed a mindset in which they wanted to be photographed humiliating others, with grins on their faces? Nor is it enough to criticise the Bush government, however responsible they may be. What is so revealing about the photos that came from Iraq is the almost pornographic nature of some of them and the sexual abuse involved. Could there be a connection I wonder with the fact that something like 40% of the population now watch pornography on the internet.

Personally I feel much as T S Eliot did after the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938. He wrote shortly afterwards that there were many people like himself who
Were deeply shaken by the events . . . persons to whom that month brought a profounder realisation of a general plight. . . . what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of the civilisation.

The attitudes revealed by those in charge at Guantanamo Bay and in the prisons of Iraq pose deeply troubling questions about whether, in Eliot’s words, there is a more general plight, a doubt about the validity of our civilisation.