|
?:reviewBody
|
-
We first encountered this bit of Internet lore (collected in the Example link above) about the government's offering to send Guantanamo detainees to live with liberals who complained about their treatment back in May 2002. It has since circulated in multiple versions, the most recent being cast as a letter sent by James Mad Dog Mattis, the recently installed Defense Secretary for the Trump administration: Rest assured this was never a letter sent out by anyone representing the White House; it is instead one anonymous author's idea of what the administration should be replying to those who criticize the conditions under which Taliban and other terrorist detainees were housed at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The Guantanamo Bay facility (abbreviated as GTMO, hence its Gitmo nickname) has been decried as inhumane by a number of human rights associations and has been denounced at various times in the American press. As we detailed in our article about a Charlie Daniels essay on the situation at Gitmo, the detainees were initially incarcerated at Camp X-Ray, a temporary holding facility near Guantanamo Bay. Inmates were kept in tin-roofed 8x8 cells that resembled dog runs: chain link fencing on a concrete base, open on the sides to the elements. They slept on foam pads placed on concrete floors in cells containing chemical toilets or buckets. At least every two days prisoners would be taken from their cells for all of 15 minutes of exercise. Those being held were later moved to nearby Camp Delta, a permanent detention center erected for this purpose. The 8x6.66 cells had beds and walls and windows, flush toilets and running water, but could still be described as austere. Some were outraged by the apparent human rights violations found at Gitmo. Others viewed the method of foreign fighters' detainment at that facility as a necessary evil if those being held were to be prevented from inflicting harm on others. Members of yet another faction regarded the matter as one of severe punishment justly earned by foreign fighters not entitled to the protections afforded under the Geneva code to conventional, uniformed prisoners of war. That divergence of opinion led to members of the first and third groups (and sometimes the second) regarding one another as fool-headed in their assessments and hopelessly out of touch with the core issues at stake. The Internet piece about the fictional LARK program was penned from such a soapbox, its author expressing through the vehicle of humor the opinion that those decrying the condition of the prisoners would quickly change their tune if they were the ones responsible for incarcerating Taliban and al Qaeda detainees. That line of thought was not original to the unknown author of the Internet piece, as evidenced by a Jim Huber Politically Correct cartoon published in January 2002. This item (which regardless of one's viewpoint is nonetheless a well-crafted use of satire — it is a playfully entertaining read that makes its point in none-too-subtle fashion) has gone through a few revisions as it has been spread its 2002 debut, most notably the change of the signature line from Cordially, George W. Bush to Cordially ... Your Buddy, Don Rumsfeld. This shift reflected a then-current societal perception of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as the one responsible for tough treatment of captured foreign fighters, a view that was somewhat subscribed to in 2002 but which gained far wider acceptance in 2004 thanks to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. Other textual alterations included the elision of this segment of the 2002 version: The section on how the fictional prisoner will get along with women in the LARK recipient's household was changed in later versions: The closing was also altered: The later cropping of the original closing paragraphs removed a key element from the piece, that of its writer's indignation over the Gitmo's decriers' insistence that a team of observers not allied with or controlled by the U.S. military be tasked with supervising the conditions under which prisoners are housed at that facility.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}