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Tuesday, May 11, 2004

It's news when WE decide that it's news
The Washington Post appears to have decided to get back into the reporting business. After a couple of years of mostly just repeating George Bush/Scott McLellan/John Kerry BS, they're now back into going out in the world and finding out what's going on. One of their main stories today has this headline:
Secret World of U.S. Interrogation: Long History of Tactics in Overseas Prisons Is Coming to Light
A selection:
In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
I've been reading the World Socialist Web Site for over two years--they've been covering all of this stuff all along, as has much of the foreign press. It's only "coming to light" in Washington now, probably because the powers that be have decided that George Worthless Bush has outlived his usefulness.