The New Yorker profile on David Addington that I wrote about over the weekend has all kinds of nuggets that clarify where and how we went horribly wrong in the 'war on terror'. One passage in particular explains why Guantanamo is such a hopeless disaster:
Just a few months after the Guantánamo detention centers were established, members of the Administration began receiving reports that questioned whether all the prisoners there were really, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had labelled them, “the worst of the worst.” Guter said that the Pentagon had originally planned to screen the suspects individually on the battlefields in Afghanistan; such “Article 5 hearings” are a provision of the Geneva Conventions. But the White House cancelled the hearings, which had been standard protocol during the previous fifty years, including in the first Gulf War. In a January 25, 2002, legal memorandum, Administration lawyers dismissed the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete,” “quaint,” and irrelevant to the war on terror. The memo was signed by Gonzales, but the Administration lawyer said he believed that “Addington and Flanigan were behind it.” The memo argued that all Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees were illegal enemy combatants, which eliminated “any argument regarding the need for case-by-case determination of P.O.W. status.” Critics claim that the lack of a careful screening process led some innocent detainees to be imprisoned. “Article 5 hearings would have cost them nothing,” the Administration lawyer, who was involved in the process, said. “They just wanted to make a point on executive power—that the President can designate them all enemy combatants if he wants to.”Battlefield screenings would seem to be a matter of simple common sense as well as basic decency. The inhumanity of locking up innocents aside, it just doesn't do us any good to detain (indefinitely!) a bunch of people who aren't really targets. It doesn't help the fight against al Qaeda; it has probably substantially harmed it. And to what end? To make a point on executive power.
And having made that point, they have to keep making it. They have to avoid scrutiny at any cost not just for the sake of avoiding scrutiny (which is reason enough under the Addington Standard) but to avoid admitting how completely they screwed things up when they made that point in the first place. It becomes a perfect feedback loop of obsessive authoritarianism.
Nixon isn't just looking up and smiling; he's laughing his evil ass off.
[That's all, folks]
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