What about Guantanamo guys?

What about Guantanamo guys?

by digby

I don't think we've had a real reckoning yet ...

This is from 2005:

A veteran interrogator at Guantánamo told The New York Times in a recent interview that it became clear over time that most of the [Guantanamo] detainees had little useful to say and that "they were just swept up" during the Afghanistan war with little evidence they played any significant role.

"These people had technical knowledge that expired very quickly after they were brought here," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Most of the emphasis was on quantity, not quality," the interrogator said, adding that the number of pages generated from an interrogation was an important standard.

Well, say hallelujah! The truth shall set us free. This has been known for at least a year, but who's counting? In January of 2004, David Rose wrote in Vanity Fair: 

According to General Miller, Gitmo's importance is growing with amazing rapidity:"Last month we gained six times as much intelligence as we did in January 2003. I'm talking about high-value intelligence here, distributed round the world."

You remember General Geoffrey Miller, don't you?  The former artillery officer who was responsible for torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and never paid a price?  Sure you are:

In July 2003, as Slahi’s “special interrogation” continued, Guantánamo commander Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller added another brutal ruse to Slahi’s interrogation plan. Following days of intensive questioning, Slahi was to be forcibly removed from his cell by a team of military police in riot gear, escorted past menacing dogs, and loaded onto a helicopter, where he would be flown out over the ocean and threatened with death or rendition to a Middle Eastern country—a threat to be made all the more real by the presence of Egyptian and Jordanian interrogators on the flight. The general’s plan was subsequently revised because, as his intelligence chief later told Justice Department investigators, “Miller had decided that [the helicopter] was too difficult logistically to pull off, and that too many people on the base would have to know about it to get it done.” Instead, on Aug. 24, 2003, in accordance with the plan that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ultimately signed, Slahi was abducted from his cell and taken on a three-hour boat trip into the Caribbean, where he was beaten and threatened by U.S. military personnel and two Arab interrogators.

It was the Army too. Are we going to pretend that the top command didn't know about it?

And by the way, this happened yesterday:

The Pentagon’s approach throughout my client’s case has offered a disturbing glimpse into the US military bureaucracy’s mentality: Though indifferent to human suffering, the US defense department is strikingly keen to be sure evidence of that suffering never sees the light of day.

When news of Abu Wa’el’s possible release reached us here at Reprieve a short while back, we sent Abu Wa’el mango juice, in order to help him come down safely from his hunger strike. But in a bizarre twist I would have thought beyond the grim imagination even of his captors, the juice was confiscated. Rather than easing up on a man it knows full well would shortly be free to speak his mind, the Pentagon preferred to fiddle with timetables, in the dim hope he would land here in Uruguay before anyone could see what terrible shape he’s in.

This secret approach echoes the Obama administration’s attitude to the force-feeding tapes – the evidence that may well have gotten Abu Wa’el released. Days before they put him on that plane, the Obama administration filed an appeal against a judgment that the public and the press had the right to see this footage. (The Guardian is involved in the lawsuit.) Officials had insisted that the tapes would “inflame Muslim sensibilities”. We consented to hiding the faces and voices of guards; but it is the face of Abu Wa’el – his voice – that the US government is afraid you’ll see.

Make no mistake: the force-feeding tapes are upsetting. If they do go public, you will probably never see Guantánamo quite the same way again. The footage cuts through years of Pentagon rhetoric. It will force people for whom Guantánamo is a long-forgotten memory to see a human being trapped at the dark heart of the national security state. The tapes show a system that damages not just detainees but the young servicemen and women we ask to participate in it. They are, in short, the truth.

Are we going to pretend that the administration doesn't know about this either?

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