Mirroring the War

When Rear Admiral Harry Harris said that the Guantanamo suicides weren't "an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us", it spoke volumes as to how fascists view themselves. Turning things on their heads, the torturers become the victims and the prisoners are attacking them by refusing to rot in their cells.

How dare they kill themselves in despair at being locked away indefinitely with no legal recourse, just to make Americans look bad?

This is par for the course in our new bizarro Bush-world, where war = peace, truth is relative and everything assumes it's opposite meaning -



Ted Rall decides to put a mirror up to the Gitmo idiocy:

The Other Side of the War

BAGHDAD--The deaths of three Americans who hung themselves in their secret cells brought renewed calls from human rights groups to bring other foreigners to trial. But leaders of the Iraqi resistance forces dismissed suggestions that the captured U.S. soldiers had committed suicide in despair over the harshness or indefinite length of their imprisonment.

"They have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own," said Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, of the detainees. "I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

Other Iraqi resistance leaders echoed this hard line, noting that radical Americans sacrifice happy and secure lives in the United States in the hope of achieving martyrdom on the dusty battlefields of the Middle East. Moreover, their fundamentalist interpretation of their Christian faith promises eternal paradise in the hereafter.

"It does sound like this is part of a strategy--in that they don't value their own lives, and they certainly don't value ours; and they use suicide as a tactic," said Mohammed Daham Abid Hamadi, a top deputy of the Popular Resistance for the Liberation of Iraq told a nationalist website. "Taking their own lives was not necessary, but it certainly is a good PR move."


The "public relations move" that our fascists fear the most is to signal that they, in fact, are not omnipotent. The Guantanamo prisoners ended their torture, and as Anthony Alessandri points out at Globalresearch, we can't have THAT now, can we?

"This attitude is also implicit in the follow-up article printed by the New York Times the next day, with the headline: "Prisoners' Ruse Is Suspected at Guantanamo." This, we learn from the article, should be the focus of inquiry: not the circumstances that drove three men to their deaths, but the question of how, given the fact that one of the elements of their confinement was constant monitoring by their captors, these men could have managed their "ruse.
"The point of systematic torture, of course, is to force the tortured to acknowledge, every minute of every day, that his life is in the hands of his torturer. No wonder, then, that the prison's commanders and their willing mouthpieces in the press are alarmed. In the most macabre and tragic sense, these are the first escapees from Guantanamo."