Thursday, January 08, 2009

Meaningless cruelty

Gitmo will go down in history as a demonstration of how a callous bureaucracy based on unjust authority will devolve into meaningless cruelty.
The Miami Herald report that30 men in Guantánamo are now being force-fed:
Washington lawyer David Remes, who represents 17 Yemenis, said some of his clients launched the latest hunger strike after Yemeni Salim Hamdan went home in November, a month shy of completion of his 66-month prison sentence.
"They've actually gone ballistic at the fact that Hamdan, who was convicted of supporting terrorism, was released and they, who have been charged with nothing, continue to languish there," said Remes, who met with clients before Christmas . . .
Long-held detainees, most held without charge since early 2002, were "elated" that Hamdan was leaving the prison camps, Remes said.
But, "that doesn't mitigate the perverseness of the situation. If an ordinary detainee knew that all you had to be [was] Osama's servant to get out, a lot of them would have fabricated confessions that they were Osama's servant."

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