Letter From Ground Zero

As the final week of the campaign season expires (this column goes to press on October 27), George W. Bush has boiled his one-theme campaign message down to a few phrases: He is "strong" and will "stay the course," but Senator John Kerry has a "record of weakness" and will "cut and run" in the face of terrorism. In these same days, a remarkable series by Tim Golden in the New York Times has given us one more look into what Bush's policy has meant in practice. Golden's subject is the creation of the military commissions to try the prisoners being held in Guantánamo. A small, tightly knit cabal of right-wing lawyers led by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld conspired in secret (even the President's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell were kept in the dark) to rewrite the laws of the United States (the Constitution) and the world (mainly the Geneva Conventions) to license a free hand in interrogating the Guantánamo prisoners.

After the President had made the innovation public, Cheney stated, "We think it guarantees that we'll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve." What they deserved, as it has turned out, was to be tortured: stripped naked, beaten, kept sleepless, threatened with dogs. Those practices--all but the beatings secretly licensed by Rumsfeld--were aimed at acquiring information needed to prosecute the "war on terror."

But no proceedings were brought. An unexpected problem arose. The prisoners neither possessed the desired information nor had committed the offenses for which the system of drumhead justice had been instituted. One commander of Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, even went to Afghanistan to complain that he was being provided with the wrong prisoners. "General, please shut up and go home," he was told, according to an officer familiar with the mission.

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