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Lost in translation at Camp Delta
By Stan Goff
The arrest of three individuals, so far, who were stationed
at Camp Delta, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, raised the question at Reuters
of whether there was a spy plot that involved Syria. Reuters is not
alone with its espionage fixation. The Christian Science Monitor warns
US Muslims that they must “do their part by refusing to tolerate
the tiny group of radicals hiding among them.” Not to be outdone
by the press, Democrat Charles Schumer wrote to Rumsfeld himself, one
of the key architects of the post 9-11 Security State, and demanded
to know why security measures “are lax at some of our most secure
military facilities.”
Since September 11, 2001, I have had to fight off the feeling that there
was a second attack — far more successful than the suicide pilots
— that quietly dispersed a powerful disabling agent throughout
the whole country that was targeted against federal officials and all
journalists who make more than $100,000 a year. This colorless, odorless,
tasteless agent attacked any neurons activated during critical thought
and left its victims vulnerable to mass delusion and terminal groupthink.
Hello? Anyone home? Plenty of light, but the motion sensors are unresponsive.
Camp Delta is not just a military facility.
How do people walk around all day and manage to ignore the fact that
this place is a concentration camp where thousands of people have been
incarcerated with all the due process and transparency of Treblinka.
The Bush administration — as has been the custom of the US government
for decades — exempted itself from all standards of international
law, rounded all these people up, some just reaching puberty in the
camp, pronounced them terrorists, and has been doing who-knows-what
with them under ZERO public oversight.
Some of us left unaffected by the aforementioned disabling agent suspect
that there are many things that can now never be allowed to see the
light of day from Camp Delta. The Bush administration — under siege
as their whole tapestry of lies begins to unravel — is waiting
for another shoe to drop, and they have to know that among all those
who have been required to play the role of turnkey at Guantanamo, there
will be some whose conscience gets the best of them... and make this
thing the Mother of all Watergates — far worse than merely outing
a CIA operative out of petty revenge. These detainees were “captured”
during a series of the most ill-conceived, legally-questionable, and
poorly executed operations in recent memory, if we exclude Chechnya.
They were rounded up between bombing Canadians, getting pinned down
for days on snowy slopes during Operation Anaconda (as if any self-respecting
reptile would stay somewhere that cold), overseeing torture and mass
execution in Marar-i-Sharif, and calling Spectre gunships in on wedding
parties. The beat goes on in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has reconstituted
itself and roams across the south in battalion-ized elements with near
impunity.
This is the background, and we are supposed to give the benefit of the
doubt to this administration — who has trampled on the Constitution,
insulted its allies, violated the UN Charter to which the United States
is a signatory, been caught in at least three vast fabrications about
its pretexts for invading Iraq, and is now investigating itself after
a 24-hour warning to all concerned who might need to shred the appropriate
documents and delete incriminating emails, for the Wilson-Plame affair.
Why is no public persona asking a simple, straightforward line of questions:
Were these detainees rounded up at random, held illegally, subjected
to violations of their basic human rights, and transformed over time
into a huge and growing political embarrassment that will have to be
buried? And are these two, perhaps three, individuals — one a West
Point graduate, Chaplain/Captain James Yee, and another an experienced
and apparently dedicated Air Force translator, Ahmad al-Halabi, who
is under suspicion for the seditious act of visiting the country of
his parents’ origin — being pre-emptively locked up? Is the
same US government that told us about Iraqi mushroom clouds blossoming
over New York arresting these Muslim American servicemen to prevent
them telling anyone just what in the hell is going on in Camp Delta?
Is anyone going to ask why a list of the so-called evidence has inexplicably
escaped into the public to circulate freely in the media, while the
accused are being held as tightly and silently as Manuel Noriega?
Who has the antidote that will restore us to skepticism? We’d better
find it quick, because if they come for Ahmad in the morning, they might
come for you in the afternoon.
Stan Goff is the author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of
the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming
book Full Spectrum Disorder (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member
of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special
Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Source: CounterPunch
