Sir, Your leading article, “Bad Language”, omits the key word used by the camp commander describing the suicides of three inmates at the Guantanamo Bay facility. As you reported elsewhere, Rear-Admiral Harry Harris characterised the suicides as “an act of asymmetrical warfare”, not, as you state, “an act of warfare”.
Asymmetrical warfare is a term referring to methods used by militarily inferior adversaries to inflict damage on their enemies — legal, political, psychological — which would otherwise not be possible. In the matter of the suicides, the language of the US commander was not inappropriate.
A more vulnerable target for your scrutiny might have been the remarks of the State Department spokesperson who dismissed the suicides as “a good PR move”. In some respects such an observation is understandable, but in the realm of public diplomacy — particularly directed at a European audience — it is cynical language like this which is bound to exacerbate an already disastrous image of the United States.
Whether accurately or not, the Guantanamo Bay camp is widely perceived as an indefensible anomaly incompatible with American values. If its continued operation is doing more harm than good to the US national interest, the time has come to close it and, just for once, bad language may contribute to a good result.
Advertisement
DR ROBERT McGEEHAN
Associate Fellow
Chatham House
London SW1