The War on Terror’s Grand Snafu--Ruth Coniff

Tweet "The story was so compelling, I sat in the driveway listening to it, hand hovering over the ignition, for almost half an hour. It turned out to be an update of This American Life's Peabody-Award-winning 2006 piece "Habeas Schmabeas". The goofy title completely undersells this blockbuster investigation of our government's horrifying treatment of Guantanamo detainees). What was particularly striking about the piece--beyond the bone-chilling description of an environment so bleak it is designed to provoke suicidal despair--was the complete incompetence of the U.S. government in apprehending people with no connection whatsoever to terrorist groups. Despite President Bush's repeated assertions that Guantanamo detainees are enemy combatants "swept up by the U.S. military on the fields of battle," only about 5 percent turn out to fit that description. Among the other 90 percent are people like Badr Zaman Badr and his brother, the Pakistani satirists interviewed on the show, who wrote an Onion-like spoof of the wrong government official and found themselves turned over to U.S. custody for supposed ties to Al Qaeda. Bounty hunters in Afghanistan have turned in their neighbors under similarly suspicious circumstances. And then there are the soft-spoken Chinese dissidents, whose only political crime appears to have been opposing the Communist government of China.

"The conservative U.S. attorney who finally won the release of the Chinese detainees has a theory that part of what's driving Administration secrecy at Guantanamo is sheer embarrassment at the nonthreatening nature of its detainees there. Not only are these people tortured, refused access to the evidence against them, and hidden from the world indefinitely at our government's whim, many of them also appear to be totally unconnected to terrorism or any plot against the United States or its citizens. Worse still, the fact that they are giving up so little information of any use has, perversely, prompted our government to use harsher and harsher interrogation techniques against its schlub captives.

"In addition to being a perversion of American and international norms of justice, It is a SNAFU of breathtaking proportions.

From The Progressive.org