The Disassembly Area
It was the last day of the month and to vaguely follow a suggestion of holding a press conference a month George found the Rose Garden and talked at the reporters who had assembled for Kool-Aid® and cookies.
You didn’t need to know the difference between “disassemble” and “dissemble” to understand that the press corpse was ready for a nap and didn’t want to bother the grown-ups by asking George real questions and pursuing real answers.
Amnesty International describes the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay as a gulag, a reference to the infamous Soviet prison system.
Hypocrisy, an overarching war mentality and a disregard for basic human rights principles and international legal obligations continue to mark the USA’s “war on terror”. Serious human rights violations are the inevitable result.
Incurious George called that “absurd” because everyone knows the US is promoting “democracy”. And he claims that the reports of abuse are based on information from former detainees trained to lie, and, further, that Amnesty International has no standing to make its claims.
Michael of the newly relocated Musing’s musings tells us in his post, Get me rewrite!, that in March, 2003, George’s own Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, cited reports from Amnesty International to help justify the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps George had assumed that all of the information he used to support the invasion of Iraq was fabricated.
Some of the detainees might be lying, of course, but it was my experience in law enforcement that the people who really hate the police are those who are innocent of any crime, but find themselves arrested. Criminals tend to be professional about it – people just doing their job – but the innocent really get pissed off. When you wander around the world scooping up innocent people, lock them up for months, and subject them to multiple indignities, those people tend not to care why you did it. The fact is you were wrong and they were injured because you were incompetent. When you refuse to apologize, refuse to offer compensation, and leave them under a cloud of suspicion, they will hate your guts forever, and will tell the rest of the world about it.
You can’t go around convicting people of abuse at military facilities and then claim no abuse took place. Organizations are using the Freedom of Information Act to make more of the abuse public. More reports and pictures are now available; the problem is wide spread.
People have died as a result of “interrogation techniques” used by the American government, which is direct evidence of torture: if it kills people, it is definitely torture.
Our government is not being honest with us, or the world. They don’t want the true extent of the problem known, but the lump under the rug is way too big to remain hidden. If Guantánamo Bay was as pure as George claims, career military JAGs wouldn’t be filing “friend of the court” briefs in Federal cases.
Maybe George should ask Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn to visit Gitmo and give his opinion; he is something of an authority on gulags.
NTodd, Riggsveda, RJ ESKOW, and the Vestal Vespa contributed to this rant whether they wanted to or not.
