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July 3, 2006
WB: Playing the Degüello
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I didn’t read McCaffrey’s comments that way. We have indefinitely imprisoned hundreds of people at Gitmo at great cost – politically and financially – who we can’t prove are guilty of anything. Many were hapless victims rounded up and turned over to the US in Afghanistan for the bounty we were paying. I think he is saying it isn’t worth it to keep Gitmo – practically speaking, he believes we would be far better off to close it and deal later with the few who are released who will actually return to fight the US. I also don’t think he sees this course of action as a precedent for other situations; he just wants to get rid of Gitmo.
Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 3 2006 11:42 utc | 1
I agree. He’s saying that if they happen to end up fighting against us after being released, so what? It would be better to fight them on the battlefield than leave them in guantanamo.
Posted by: Sestina | Jul 3 2006 14:38 utc | 2
We could release them from Gitmo and give them detailled maps to Cheney & Rumsfeld’s houses…
Posted by: ralphieboy | Jul 3 2006 15:02 utc | 3
detailed maps to cheney’s house
one problem for the admin w/ the gitmo detainees is that the program is so exposed & public now that there’s no easy way to dispose of the bodies. alfred mccoy contrasts this predicament against the phoenix program in vietnam where the cia had little problem executing a “pump and dump” process – “pumping suspects for information by torture and then dumping the bodies, more than twenty thousand of them between 1968 and 1971.” both phoenix and gitmo served as laboratories for refining and customizing physical and psychological techniques of not only extracting any useful information – which was limited at best – but, more importantly, understanding how to wage battle against “enemy” populations on as many fronts as possible. mccoy and others have pointed out the role that the detainees in gitmo served, as we saw after the techniques tested there were instituted at abu ghraib and elsewhere. unlike phoenix, it’s not as simple as loading up detainees into a helicopter and dumping them beyond the bay. and, with acess to their own lawyer, well, you can see the threats this poses to the u.s. establishment. the problem is not that the release of the detainees in any way threatens a random citizen in the united states, it threatens to further peel away the facade that is used to maintain the war of terror (or “war on terror” as they spin it).
Posted by: b real | Jul 3 2006 18:06 utc | 4