CIA Counterterrorism vet, Johnson, calls bullshit...

From NO QUARTER blog:

Monday, 12 June 2006
Animal Farm and Guantanamo
byLarry C. Johnson

According to General Barry McCaffrey, those wiley terrorists in Guantanamo attacked us by committing suicide. HUH?

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey said Guantanamo has become a political problem for the United States.

"I don't know how we get out of this," said McCaffrey. "Some of these people are extremely dangerous. This was an act of political warfare by the three people that committed suicide, the same as a suicide bomber in downtown Baghdad."

Folks, we are now in the twilight zone. The United States is holding people as terrorists (becauase we say so) without access to the Geneva Convention or our Constitution. I am old enough to remember the Cold War. I remember the Soviet Union declaring Alex Solzhenitsyn and others as "enemies of the state". They were deprived of due process and judicial access. Of course, correctly so, the United States and human rights organizations spoke out against this abuse.

Now, I have lived long enough to see the United States behave like the Soviets. I remember feeling quite smug when reading Animal Farm. Thank God we Americans were not like that. We were certain that these books spoke about Soviet abuses while we touted our vastly superior moral position. We are now shitting where we sleep. Some of the prisoners in Guatanamo probably represent a serious threat to the United States. But our conduct there has made them martyrs and put them on par with the likes of Thomas Paine, Nelson Mandela, and Andrei Sakharov.

Some of our leaders are trying to rationalize the suicide of these prisoners as an act of violence against us. They kill themselves, harm no one else but themselves, and that is an attack on us? BULLSHIT ALERT!!! We can try to excuse what is inexcusable behavior. We can chant like the pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm that four legs are good but two legs are better. But, if we sit idle and say nothing when our leaders offer the lame excuse that prisoners who are in our custody, and who are supposed to be under almost constant observation, are engaging in terrorism when they hang themselves--harming only themselves--we have become the pigs.

(NOTE: The link to Stentorian highlights the fact that he needs to update his Animal Farm analogies. It makes no sense to talk about Bill Clinton in light of the actions of Bush and Cheney.)

Posted by Larry Johnson on Monday, 12 June 2006 at 04:19

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