By Tavit Geudelekian

There is a regrettable break between the rhetorical intentions and the definitive actions of the Bush administration. For example, during the last State of the Union Address Bush said, “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace – a peace founded upon the dignity and the rights of every man and woman.”

But what concerns me about this statement is the hypocrisy that lies behind the words. In the case of America seeking to democratize the Middle East - remember those “rogue states”- it seems that a dangerous hypocrisy is at play, and this causes me to question the integrity of our well-intentioned statements.

When President Bush spoke about “every man and woman,” he seemed to be making a pretty universal statement about the extension of equal rights. I would interpret this as a statement that links the ideal of democracy with the basic tenets of human rights – the ideal of liberty that we believe all human beings are entitled to regardless of their race, gender, ethnicity or nationality. However, the discovery that American intelligence and security forces have been illegally detaining “enemy combatants” and “suspected terrorists” in a detention center on a Naval base in Guantanamo Bay Cuba, throws into question the kind of democracy that we want to export and our integrity. These suspects, perhaps abducted are nonetheless detained without the basic rights that a legally arrested prisoner would receive, ranging from the basic rights of prisoners held for detention, to procedures of a fair trial, to practices of coercion, violent interrogation, racial, religious and ethnic profiling to obtain the “truth.”

Does our democracy vanish when we are dealing with suspected enemies in a detention camp on a small island? Does our democracy forgo its own justice system, an influential archetype to the developing nations of the world, by denying suspects a fair trial or judgment by an impartial judicial system? Our Constitution specifically addresses these issues by outlining provisions of Due Process. Currently, the Guantanamo Bay cases are in their appeals phase because the first rounds Rasul v. Bush, 03-334 and Al Odah v. United States, 03-343 held that although the suspects were being detained by the US, they found that the administration could not be tried for violating US legal standards because the detainees were being held in the “sovereign territory of Cuba” and thus outside the jurisdiction of US laws.

I believe we need to expose these hypocrisies not only in order to make our current international and domestic rhetorical intentions more credible, but as the world’s most authoritative and wealthiest superpower, our actions must be transparent and responsible. Right now, the current administration is defining political and military precedents that will reverberate for years to come. The United States is trying to promote democracy around the world, but our actions at Guantanamo Bay are anything but democratic. We must ask ourselves what our democracy stands for before we export it to places around the world that are unfamiliar with the concept. If we can’t stop being hypocritical, how can we be a beacon to the rest of the world we wish to change?