We'd better not turn away just yet from the suicides of those three detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The rest of the world clearly isn't ready to move on. And with good reason.
In many newspapers around the globe "Guantanamo" is much more than the name of a beautiful harbor on Cuba's southern coast. It has become shorthand for a whole litany of American excesses in George W. Bush's "global war on terror," the most visible example of how the United States blithely ignores the values of due process and rule of law that it so aggressively preaches, if necessary at the point of a gun.
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The point here isn't to go all bleeding-heart over three men who may well have been the type who gleefully slaughter innocents in the name of a warped religiousness. The point is that when our government mocks transparency and tries to conduct this war of ideas in the shadows, away from prying eyes, we defeat ourselves.
Four journalists -- from the Charlotte Observer, the Miami Herald and the Los Angeles Times -- who happened to be at Guantanamo on other business and whose reporting could have independently confirmed the Pentagon's version of the suicides were unceremoniously put on a plane home last Wednesday. The Pentagon's rationale -- that it was unfair to allow the reporters to stay, because others who wanted to come and cover the story were being turned away -- is one of those masterpieces of faux logic for which Donald Rumsfeld is justly famous. Wouldn't the solution be to let other journalists in, rather than kick those four out?
Emphasis added.
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