Disappeared

July 15, 2008

There’s a new book out about the frat-house resort “ Club Gitmo.” [ Warning: link goes to dittoheads wearing Club Gitmo t-shirts. ] Here’s the Washington Post’s synopsis:

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration … Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in “making torture the official law of the land in all but name.” Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, “hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system” and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration. [ Collateral Damage ]

In 2002 up to a third of the detainees had been imprisoned by mistake:

A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were “enemy combatants” subject to indefinite incarceration. [ A blind eye to Gitmo? ]

But the CIA was wrong because George W. Bush said so.

“There will be no review,” the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.” [ Ibid. ]

Besides the fact that we incarcerated and most probably tortured large numbers of innocent people, this means the scenario I described yesterday is not far-fetched.

On occasion I have heard people joke to me about the “great conditions” at Guantanamo Bay, saying they wished their vacation had been as nice. I don’t know about the great conditions. But it is too bad that they — or all the folks smiling in Club Gitmo shirts, especially Rush Limbaugh himself — did not get to experience them first-hand. For four years. While their families back home wonder where they went.

Hat Tip: Hilzoy.

Posted in Politics