These are place names which will haunt American politics for a long time, like Manzanar and Minidoka.
McClatchy's Washington Bureau has been running an investigative series of reports about the treatment of detainees at the locations in the title. It's dreadful, and its implications are pretty clear: the orders for the torture of persons held there came from very high up in the Bush Administration. This is from today's article:
The framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantanamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan wasn't the product of American military policy or the fault of a few rogue soldiers.It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.
The worst of it is, the lawyers and their bosses will maintain till their dying days that they were doing what was right, morality and common sense be damned.
Posted by Linkmeister at June 18, 2008 10:50 AM | TrackBack