"No matter how many stories there are like the one today from McClatchy's -- where emphatic accusations about a detainee turn out to be totally false"

While I agree with your criticism of our government's actions and am appalled by such, I find your use of vague absolutes and/or exaggerated declarations such as that above damaging to your credibility.

Youseff's piece was indeed good journalism, but did not disprove the government's allegations. One cannot disprove an accusation of this sort. What her reporting does establish is that there is good reason not to accept the government's allegation(s), specifically, that the reason for Wakil's original detention was the accusation of a single source. I think it's also true that many sources could be created by our government through bribery or torture.

The conclusion I come to is that our government's accusations are highly suspect and to have uttered them was immoral and dishonest. To have imprisoned Wakil for so long without benefit of counsel and a fair trial was criminal as well as grossly immoral and dishonest, but one cannot honestly say the emphatic accusations turned out to be totally false.

Not only was it great journalism, it made me want to puke.

Nancy YOUSSEF? Does that sound like a red-blooded American name to anyone here? It certainly ain't no Christian name.

The central assumption in our discussions of Guantanamo and detention policy generally has been, and continues to be, that those in Guantanamo are, by definition, Terrorists. No matter how many times that is proven to be false, the assumption endures. --- G.G.

It is said that in the USSR, one was obviously guilty if he was arrested. After all, the government only arrested guilty people it was believed. There is no difference here; it is said they must be terrorists because they were accused of terrorism.

This is not unusual in the American justice system. Most people believe that if a man is charged with a crime in America then he must be guilty; and they are very happy with any action, legal or otherwise, from the prosecutor to put that man away --- screw fair trials.

We lost our way here at home long, long before we lost our way in regards to the treatment of Arab 'terrorists', but it is easier to see the lack of justice in these cases.

Great article Glenn.

So we invade and occupy his country...

RE:

Despite all of that, the Pentagon continued to keep him in a cage for four more years based on extremely vague associations that led them to insist that he was an "enemy combatant." So we invade and occupy his country and then decide that -- although he worked against our Enemies -- some alleged "associations" he had reflect an agenda that conflicts with ours and a "source's" unverified accusations that he helped our Enemy entitle us to lock him away. So we abduct him from his country and ship him thousands of miles away to an island, stick him in a cage for six years with no trial, call him an "enemy combatant," and then once he's released, he does nothing to engage in any violence or attacks on the U.S. of any kind (even though we're still bombing and occupying his country).

You left out the last sentence - So the Pentagon re-accuses him of "terrorist" activity, and he faces the implicit threat of re-incarceration.

Putting this all-too-rare exemplar together with last week's WaPo payola scandal leads to some fundamental insights.

McClatchy's work seems largely consistent with the belief that that they are in the business of exposing and deriving value from truth. When you look at the big picture, the Washington Post is in the business of creating and deriving value from access.

The Youssef will likely have a strongly negative CWF (cocktail weenie factor) -- access to "senior administration officials" and other unnamed sources will suffer. And low CWFs are not associated with the ability to monetize that access by charging some of the people you are theoretically reporting on to speak with other people you are theoretically reporting on.

It isn't fair to compare this story to what the Post and the Times publish -- they really aren't in the same business.

Very sad and depressing article...Combined with an increasing sense of powerlessness...it's not nice to treat the people like this...I feel like the sleeping giant may awaken, and it will not be pretty...for anyone...

Yes, I am being sarcastic. However, sadly I can easily see wingnuts using this argument.

Why? Particularly when there are so many holes in the official 9/11 story.

Yet we continue to use al Qaeda and 9/11 to justify two major wars that are sapping our country and killing countless numbers of innocent people.

I know you are being sarcastic, but there is another point that should be mentioned. Youssef's parents are from Egypt. She speaks Arabic. While not everybody in American journalism can have the benefit of exposure to another culture through their parents, being fluent in another language is a big factor with understanding and empathizing with other cultures and understanding that people can see things in different ways. And that makes one susceptible to the notion that the flat version of the rest of the world emerging from much of American media and government isn't really correct.

I had a conversation with a parent of a teenager the other day and she was asking (she wasn't from the U.S.) about my (public school) education back in the (Pleistocene?) days. When I told her I'd had art and music through 8th grade, and started a second language in 3rd grade, and a third in 10th, she was stunned.

Why is McClatchy wasting time reporting on such things? How are they going to survive, let alone get people interested in their reporting, if they don't have a satirical web show that makes pithy, cringeworthy jokes about political sex scandals? You call this story good reporting?

Why, I remember when Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite used to do a spoofy radio program that trafficked in gossip and loest-common-denominator humor, and by golly, it was the bee's knees!

Today, McClatchy has proven that journalism is dead.