More Tension for Greg Mortenson

Last year over the summer, I read the memoir Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. In it, Mortenson explains how a failed climb up the mountain K2 resulted in a chance encounter with an impoverished, uneducated village in Pakistan. This encounter, he says, inspired Mortenson to dedicate his life to philanthropic works centered around building schools for this village, and others like it. I enjoyed the book when I read it, and was inspired by the optimism and selflessness evident in the story.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I read an article claiming that Mortenson’s story may be at least partially fabricated. My initial reaction was one of disappointment. The fact that Mortenson may have (lied or at the very least exaggerated) much of Three Cups of Tea completely ruined the book for me. I felt like Oprah, who recommended James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, only to find out that it was largely made up, and not based on Frey’s life as he had claimed. The people who had been inspired by the story of addiction and redemption in the book rejected it, along with Frey. Now, with Greg Mortenson coming under fire in much the same fashion, Three Cups of Tea risks seeing the same fate. Will Mortenson be able to prove that the book is factual?

More importantly, does it really matter if Mortenson exaggerated? Does all of the inspiration people got from his book vanish just because parts of the book are less than accurate? I don’t think so, especially in Mortenson’s case. Though the genesis of his philanthropic spirit might have been fudged, the very real changes he has helped to bring about cannot be denied. Even if the allegations against Mortenson turn out to be true, I’m not going to let that ruin what was, for me, a very good book.

Trying to Get Mo' Context about Gitmo

Recently, I read an article in my favorite magazine (at least when I want to feel intellectual), the New Yorker. The article, by Hendrik Hertzberg, detailed the drastic shift in public opinion regarding the rights (or lack thereof) of the prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. He opens with an anecdote about the treatment of several thousand Nazis under the command of General Erwin Rommel (incidentally, one of my favorite historical figures) who were captured by Allied forces in 1943. Though most Americans rightly viewed the Nazis with a fair amount of disgust and contempt, the prisoners were treated justly, in accordance with the Geneva conventions.

Fast forward to the present, and we have a situation with Guantanamo Bay that closely mirrors that event in 1943. The similarities are obvious: the United States is has captured many enemy combatants and doesn’t really know what to do with them. The differences are more subtle: unlike in 1943, there is a good chance that many prisoners in Guantanamo are not combatants at all, and have been wrongfully imprisoned without a trial. Also unlike in 1943, the prisoners in Guantanamo are not affiliated with any country, and as such it is much less likely that the U.S. be held accountable for any human rights abuses.

In 2008, Barack Obama ran on a platform to close Guantanamo Bay and end the United States’ policy of illegally detaining and torturing prisoners. As Hertzberg points out, public opinion was overwhelmingly in support of this position. However, this didn’t last long. Though Obama signed an executive order early in his presidency to close Gitmo, it’s clear that it was never a priority. It was a priority, though, for others to exploit an easily scared public to make sure that the prisoners (or the more acceptably and vaguely termed “detainees”) were locked up indefinitely without trial.

It’s difficult for many Americans, myself included, to watch a situation unfolding that has such strong ties to a World War II moment. I’m not speaking of the German POW scenario Hertzberg mentioned; the just handling of such a demonstrably evil group of individuals is a source of national pride. I refer instead to the Japanese internment camps, a mistake that goes down as one of the greatest human rights abuses in our nation’s history. Some may claim that, while virtually all of the Japanese-Americans held in internment camps were innocent of any wrongdoing, a large number of Guantanamo detainees are terrorists plotting to destroy the U.S. If this is so, however, why not put them on trial? If they are so clearly guilty, why not lay out the evidence in a civilian court and justify locking them up for good? There are no easy answers to this question, mostly because only one side is morally justifiable. Someday Americans will look back on this event as one in which political expediency trumped morality, in which the popular position trumped the principled one. On a lighter note, this horrible betrayal of everything America stands for also gave us "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay", a movie which, despite myself, I found very funny.