Okay, let’s review.
First, three prisoners at Guantamao commit suicide.
Then the camp commander of the camp, Read Adm Harris, where this happened is quoted as saying this suicide is “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us“.
Then we have the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, who we could perhaps assume might actually be, you know, diplomatic, quoted as saying that the suicides were “a good PR move to draw attention“.
So, at this point I’m all ready to write some scathing sarcasm to react to this, but apparently I am too late.
Fafblog pretty much nails the sarcasm down:
Run for your lives – America is under attack! Just days ago three prisoners at Guantanamo Bay committed suicide in a savage assault on America’s freedom to not care about prisoner suicides! Oh sure, the “Blame Atrocities First” crowd will tell you these prisoners were “driven to despair,” that they “had no rights,” that they were “held and tortured without due process or judicial oversight in a nightmarish mockery of justice.” But what they won’t tell you is that they only committed suicide as part of a diabolical ruse to trick the world into thinking our secret torture camp is the kind of secret torture camp that drives its prisoners to commit suicide! This fiendish attempt to slander the great American institution of the gulag is nothing less than an act of asymmetrical warfare against the United States – a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people! – and when faced with a terrorist attack, America must respond. Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast!
…
Well, if I can’t do sarcasm, surely I can do righteous anger, right?
Nope, Charlie Stross already did that, and better than I could have:
It’d be a good start if Rear Admiral Harris washed his mouth out with soap and started investigating why prisoners at Guantanamo Bay seem to think that hanging themselves is an improvement over their current situation. It’d be an even better start if his bosses in the Pentagon and the Department of Defense were arrested and sent to the Hague for trial for crimes against humanity — to wit, torture, waging illegal war, acts of terror against civilian populations, collective punishment, and most of the rest of the bill of goods that applied at Nuremburg in 1946 — but that’ll have to wait.
Charlie also references some highlights from the report The Guantanamo Detainees: The Government’s Story, that you may find illuminating. In particular the finding that “Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.”
So, I guess that’s covered. I’ll have to go back to working on my giant post about the “Toronto Terrorists”, security certificates, and the way CSIS and the RCMP are using Rove-ian framing in our country now.
