McClatchy Newspapers is scheduled on Sunday to release a major investigation of the facts behind the detention of some 66 people in Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan by the U.S. government. It will bolster one inescapable conclusion: President Bush, by sanctioning a policy that not only denies due process to people it deems terrorist suspects but has also led to the torture of many of these suspects, has aided the terrorists.
The investigation also underscores the importance of this week's U.S. Supreme Court decision granting constitutional rights and access to U.S. courts to the detainees.
A video preview of the series demonstrates the point. Some of the detainees, McClatchy found, were actually trying to help the U.S. and Afghanistan governments pacify radical elements in Afghanistan. They were roughed up in Afghan detainee camps and then dispatched to Guantanamo, where, McClatchy reports, "they were placed in cells next to some of the most radical imams and jihadist fighters from across the world. Those racial Islamists seized the chance and tried to indoctrinate as many of their fellow detainees as possible ... turning Guantanamo, which was set up to make America safer, into a school for Jihad."
President Bush has made it clear that he dislikes the narrow Supreme Court ruling that will add an element of justice to this system. Dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia has laid out the conservative talking point, that the ruling "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."
What seems more likely to get more Americans killed is the Bush administration's disregard for the rule of law, which has done more to make us hated around the world than any pronouncements from Osama bin Laden.
Read the story Sunday at McClatchy's news site or in your local McClatchy paper.
