According to the six-year narrative of the press and political class, the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies fall somewhere between the Spanish Inquisition and the Ministry of Love in "1984." So it was something of a shock to read a remarkable front-page story in the New York Times yesterday, the abridged version being: Never mind.
In their 1,600-word dispatch "Next President Will Face Test on Detainees," reporters William Glaberson and Margot Williams discover that, gee whiz, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay really are dangerous terrorists. The Times reviewed "thousands of pages" of evidence that the government has so far made public and concludes that perhaps the reality is more complicated than the critics claim.
Lo and behold, detainees are implicated in such terror attacks as the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Those with "serious terrorism credentials" include al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and the so-called "Dirty 30," Osama bin Laden's cadre of bodyguards. The Times didn't mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, though he's awaiting a war-crimes tribunal at Gitmo too.
Holy Cow! It only took from 2002 until the 2008 election for the Times to finally get through their rigorous investigation of Gitmo. And just in time for a liberal president, the Times finds justification for the prison! What a coincidence! I guess these reporters were slowed down by reading the stirring poetry of some of the inmates. I'm sure these reporters are just kicking themselves that they could not have revealed this vital discovery during the earlier months of the Bush Administration.
But they've set the precedent. One wonders what we'll discover in four years just in the nick of too late to matter in the election?
Next week on Tales of the Newly Discovered Reality, the New York Times explains why President Obama will not seek the repeal of the Patriot Act and ridicules those Right Wing paranoid fanatics who think the federal government might try to use the act to find out what books Joe the Plumber checked out of the public library.
All this and more! On Tales of the Newly Discovered Reality!
