Sunday, July 13, 2008

We Must Put Things Right

War Crimes? Yes. To our great shame. There is only one way to cleanse this stain from our dishonor, and that's to put the perpetrators on trial. Which is more than detainees got.

A Blind Eye to Guantanamo?

A CIA analyst warned the Bush administration in 2002 that up to a third of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have been imprisoned by mistake, but White House officials ignored the finding and insisted that all were “enemy combatants” subject to indefinite incarceration, according to a new book critical of the administration’s terrorism policies.

The CIA assessment directly challenged the administration’s claim that the detainees were all hardened terrorists — the “worst of the worst,” as then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at the time. But a top aide to Vice President Cheney shrugged off the report and squashed proposals for a quick review of the detainees’ cases, author Jane Mayer writes in “The Dark Side,” scheduled for release next week.

“There will be no review,” the book quotes Cheney staff director David Addington as saying. “The president has determined that they are ALL enemy combatants. We are not going to revisit it.”
(H/T The Agitator)

The rest of the world knows the truth. American military deserters may have an asylum claim in Canada now. Read it here.