Inconvenient GITMO Truths

Yes, ‘bulo knows, everybody is bored with Iraq/Afghanistan/GITMO. Just like everybody is bored with the criminal behavior of the Bush Administration (Although said boredom doesn’t extend to the slugs in the press who are outraged that Robert Gibbs didn’t treat Dick Cheney with respect. Perhaps, if their outrage had included revealing the multitude of criminal endeavors emanating from Cheney’s office while Cheney was in office, in other words doing their jobs, the national press would be accorded more respect than, say, Dick Cheney.) But The Beast Who Slumbers digresses.

GITMO was and is bad. Very bad. Yes, the wingnuts will scream about how they’d rather be safe than sorry. And that might even hold some plausibility when and if the nature of the detainees is in doubt. However, this article by Lawrence Wilkerson lays out how that wasn’t even close to being the case with the detainees sent to Guantanamo. Even if you’re bored with these issues, please read the entire article.

Here is the crux of Wilkerson’s piece:

Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.

This was a factor of having too few troops in the combat zone, of the troops and civilians who were there having too few people trained and skilled in such vetting, and of the incredible pressure coming down from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others to “just get the bastards to the interrogators”.

It did not help that poor U.S. policies such as bounty-hunting, a weak understanding of cultural tendencies, and an utter disregard for the fundamentals of jurisprudence prevailed as well (no blame in the latter realm should accrue to combat soldiers as this it not their bailiwick anyway).

The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.

But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.

This really only scratches the surface of Wilkerson’s article. If you read the entire thing (it’ll only take about 10 minutes of your life at most), you will have a pretty good understanding of just how twisted and screwed-up not only GITMO was, but also the twisted contortions now being used by Dick Cheney to somehow blame the Obama Administration for problems going forward.

The 4th Estate that is apoplectic about Gibbs’ dissing of Cheney, as a group, allowed this kind of black box operation to continue unabated.  Their misplaced priorities (as can now be seen in their group effort to discourage Congress and the Department of Justice from investigating and possibly prosecuting Bush officials for misdeeds, misdeeds that largely flew under the radar due to journalistic deference) are one of the reasons that the corporate news media is in disrepute. But again, ‘bulo digresses.

Just read the damn article, and then get back here to praise it or to lambaste the Beast Who Slumbers by pointing out any fallacies in Wilkerson’s or ‘bulo’s logic.