Post-Gazette Editorial – 9/12/06

This page was last updated on September 13, 2006.

On trial / Seamy questions remain on prisoner handling; Editorial; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; September 12, 2006.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“President Bush’s announcement last week that 14 high-profile captives were being transferred from secret CIA prisons to the Department of Defense facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba raised as many questions as it answered.

“The issue is further clouded by the fact that Mr. Bush called on Congress to pass legislation urgently, before the elections, to make it possible finally to put the prisoners on trial, the U.S. Supreme Court having thrown out the previous rules he intended to use to bring that about. Some of the terror suspects, whom the administration considers among the most senior members of al-Qaida, have been held since 2001.”

[RWC] Aren’t prisoners of war held until the war’s end?

“Question: How do the American people know that 14 are all that is left of the 100 or so previously suggested to have been held? Mr. Bush chose to tell the public last week only so much. The administration’s record for truth-telling in this area is not solid gold, or even sterling.”

[RWC] The editorial tells us the Bush administration lies, but fails to provide examples.

When will folks like the PG realize that when you “tell the public,” you tell the enemy?

“Question: If only 14 are left, what happened to the others held in the secret CIA-controlled camps? Mr. Bush suggested that they had been returned to their home countries, or sent to other countries where charges are pending against them, or already turned over to the Defense Department. Did any of them die in detention, under interrogation, for example?

“This very casual accounting for human beings held by the United States is completely inconsistent with American standards of justice and respect for due process of law.

“Question: Where were they held? Which countries allowed this to take place on their soil? To reveal that might put at risk those countries’ future willingness to accept secret CIA prisons on their soil. But from the American point of view, the Bush administration put them offshore in a deliberate attempt to keep them out of the U.S. system of justice, so they might be tortured or otherwise deprived of rights they would otherwise have.”

[RWC] “So they might be tortured?” Of course, assume the worst of Americans. After all, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) compared the Club Gitmo guards to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others – that had no concern for human beings.”

“How is that consistent with legal measures that are a hallmark of the land of the free and the home of the brave, the principles that make the U.S. system of justice different from that of, say, Zimbabwe, Cuba or Kyrgyzstan?

“America’s holding for years -- without trial, overseas and with the possibility of torture that would not be acceptable in the United States -- an unknown number of prisoners whose names are unknown to the public and who are unaccounted for by their families is simply inconsistent with American justice. The Bush administration needs to clean up this dark, foul-smelling cell of extralegal actions now.”

[RWC] Question: Does the PG know we’re at war?

The way I read editorials like this is that the PG would rather lose this war than win it if that means not treating terrorist prisoners captured on the battlefield as we would a common shoplifter.

What is conspicuous by its absence? You’ll note the editorial didn’t dedicate one word to the fate of Americans taken prisoner by the enemy. It also didn’t mention treatment of American prisoner guards by terrorist prisoners.