Salem to Cuba, Then and Now

Through his novel “The Crucible”, Arthur Miller does an incredible job of demonstrating how fear and hysteria can lead to the persecution and gross mistreatment of those who are falsely accused with little or no evidence supporting the allegations. Sure, its to hard to read about the innocent people who died needlessly during the Salem witch trials, but surely we’re past the days of blindly accusing people without solid justification, are we not? It happened with the witch hunt in Salem in the 17th century, it happened again in the late 40’s and through the 50’s with the Red Scare, and I believe it is happening again with the so called “War on Terror”.

In 2002, The Executive Branch of the United States Government ordered that a detainment camp be opened at the United States Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold 775 “suspected Al Quaeda and Taliban operatives”. These people were basically kidnapped, and the U.S. Government classified the detainees as “enemy combatants” rather than prisoners of war in order to sidestep the Geneva Conventions. The paralells between Miller’s account of the Salem witch trials and the situation at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp are a little unnerving to say the least.

Naturally, when people are taken out of thier element and put into a situation where there is an indefinate or even potential death sentence, they will do almost anything to improve thier own situation, even if it means lying through their teeth. In the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp, three quarters of the prisoners confessed to some involvement in terrorism in exchange for improved living conditions such as improved food rations, increased recreation time and/or a transfer to the camp’s medium security facility. At first glance it seems like a reasonable trade, but you have to take the camp’s long track record of using undesirable “interrogation techniques” into consideration. Former prisoners of the camp have made accusations of torture such as being shackled to walls for several days on end and being starved for up to twenty days at a time among countless other forms of abuse.

I’m sure after 72 hours of being chained in the fetal position, sitting in a cocktail of your own urine and feces, most people wouldn’t hesitate if they were presented with the opportunity to start eating decent meals and go play a game of basketball, even if it did mean confessing to something that you didn’t actually do. Those tried for witchcraft in The Crucible were faced with the same dilemma as the prisoners in Guantanamo, either stand your ground and suffer the consequences, or abandon your values to save yourself.