Murders at Gitmo?

[babylonsister]

Did this even get on the media radar, besides KO?


Murders at Gitmo?

by Conor Friedersdorf


A new report alleges that the U.S. covered up the 2006 murders of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Conor Friedersdorf on why the GOP must reckon with the illegal, immoral acts of the Bush administration before mounting a return to power.

With their victory in Massachusetts, Republicans are eager to defeat the Democratic health-care bill and obstruct a big-government domestic agenda that they regard as creeping tyranny. But an article in Harper’s magazine reminds us that the right is far less willing to question government and champion liberty in foreign policy. In the magazine’s March issue, writer Scott Horton provides circumstantial evidence that the United States government covered up the 2006 murders of three Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The official report issued by the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service called the deaths suicides, implausibly claiming that the trio simultaneously hung themselves in separate, non-adjacent cells after binding their own hands and shoving rags down their own throats. Now four military personnel assigned to guard duty on the night in question “provide evidence that authorities initiated a coverup within hours of the prisoners’ deaths,” Mr. Horton writes, disclosing evidence “that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths.”

Why raise this story now that a new administration is running the war on terrorism? We’ve long known that under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney the U.S. government set up a secret prison system where detainees were tortured, and that numerous prisoners held in extra-legal settings died due to extreme abuse by American guards or interrogators.

This new case is nevertheless worth our attention. Beyond the fact that laws were broken and lives extinguished, the Gitmo Three may provide additional proof that the United States perpetrated extreme abuses of power in recent memory—a painful fact that we must acknowledge if we’re to prevent its recurrence.

And yet conservatives are so far content to ignore the story.

If I may address the skeptics on the right directly, it is penny wise and pound foolish to worry about creeping tyranny via government-run health care or gun control when we’re another terrorist attack away from popular support for an archipelago of secret prisons where anyone can be whisked away and tortured without any evidence against them. Look to Europe if you doubt whether government-run health care or black sites run by secret police are a more immediate threat to the liberty of innocents.

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-01-20/murders-at-gitmo/full/

[90-percent]

1. Keith and/or Rachel

Have both been on it repeatedly.

-jim

[Soylent Brice]

2. K&R

[midnight]

3. The talking point was that the current administration wants to move forward

and not look back..... Probably the most dangerous step to take considering all the broken laws, and innocent people killed...