I'm watching the NatGeo special an Gitmo and it does acknowledge that many of the detainees were innocent victims of the bounty policy. But there is no acknowledgement of the development of the 'mosaic philosophy' the belief that
"it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified. Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work." <http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/03/some_truths_abo/> I've been increasingly hearing about this view that it didn't matter whether the detainees were actually dangerous terrorists and that in fact the people in charge of the interrogation program knew early on that they weren't. The only issue was that they possessed information. _______________________________________________ OSX-Nutters mailing list | [email protected] http://lists.tit-wank.com/mailman/listinfo/osx-nutters List hosted at http://cat5.org/
