Mattwa, I think it's important to realize Bush & Co want to suppress these stories, and that lawyers and law firms representing Guantanamo detainees have themselves been targeted by the government.

We would agree that stories about Guantanamo cannot be fully reported, anymore than stories about the Soviet gulag or other secret prison systems could be fully validated while they operated. But that just makes every scrap of information we can gather about the American gulag more vital. Unless these stories are publicized, the secret prison and torture system will continue. Yet until it stops and the records open, we will not be able to know the full (or fuller) story. It's a Catch-22, yes, but it's time we stop Bush and Co. from using it to their own favor.

Better this story than another well-documented expose on the Luv Guv.

Actually, we do have plenty of evidence that prisoners held by Americans throughout the world were subjected to stress positions, loud music, hot and cold exposure, sleep deprivation, extreme social isolation, sexual and cultural humiliation, physical mistreatment, bouts of drowning, fake lawyers, and withdrawing of medical treatment.

Many of these approaches seem derived from psychological and medical studies.

I would assume that the government has been making careful notes on what "works" and what does not. Experimenting on prisoners, in other words.

Note to xrandadu; I don't know the Latin, but the common name is Shinyheaded Foulmouthed Snapper

Timbukton is right, Bush wants to serve? Let's send him to the front lines. Let's see him veto that one!

The struggle over the status of these prisoners also reminds me of the 19th century struggle over the legal status of Indians. A major underlying cause of the Indian genocide was to deny Indians rights under any theory of status, or for the government to switch their status as a means to determine their fate. The Trail of Tears is a poignant example.

Another parallel is the legal treatment of Modoc leaders after the Modoc War (CA/OR). The issues seem eerily familiar: punishment without trial versus military tribunals versus access to the courts. Similar issues concerning lawyers and translators. In the end atrocities against "Americans" were punished, atrocities against Indians were not. Activists of the day probably did prevent the hanging of two teenage Modoc boys--who were sent to Alcatraz instead. The remaining members of the tribe were forced to camps in Oklahoma.

An important difference, though--there were only fifty-some Modoc warriors plus women and children. US offshore prisons cannot hold every discontented Muslim, not even every radical extremist, let alone all the innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time. The policy failed. Like Alcatraz, Gitmo is something of a museum, and the prisoners there, though very real, exhibits. There are no more Oklahomas in the world. The jail-em-all model can't work longterm. No wonder the US wants these prisoners to die, though it can't allow them to commit suicide.

Terrorist acts are criminal. The terrorists' model is war, our model should be justice. Terrorists lose twice over when they get fair trials. We lose when we choose, or have to choose, the model of war over the model of fair legal treatment. We know we're winning when suspects are given a fair trial and the guilty sent to prison, the innocent set free. We need to realize that judicial processes must be part of dealing with terrorism.

Imprisonment is punishment. Guilty or not, the Guantanamo prisoners are being punished without due process, or with only the flimsiest excuse for due process. The government is playing with the prisoners legal status not to decrease terror, but to protect the administration from being judged for its legal bungling. The administration has damaged its own cases against the prisoners, and that damage has the potential to harm us all. Now the Bush administration is trying to run out the clock so the next administration will inherit the legal mess it has created.

Is the campaigning and skullduggery still about winning the nomination? Does her campaign believe that is possible? I don't see an obvious angle, unless there's something devious.

Does she have some issue she's afraid will be overlooked if she doesn't carry on to the convention? If so, what is it?

Or, is it just a matter of seeking power, or revenge on an upstart, or...what?