While reading about the Poetry of Guantánamo Bay, I ran across this interview with a staff writer of The New Yorker and decided it needed it’s own blog post:

AMY GOODMAN: Jane Mayer, you also report that back in 2002, the CIA warned that up to a third of the prisoners at Guantanamo may have been imprisoned by mistake.

JANE MAYER: Isn’t that—to me, this is one of the amazing anecdotes in this book. It’s not the ACLU. It’s not, you know, some kind of outside human rights group. It’s the CIA that warned the government. They sent—the CIA sent a particular expert down to Guantanamo in the summer of 2002 to figure out what’s going on. Why are we not getting better intelligence out of these detainees down in Guantanamo? And he was an Arab speaker and an expert in Islamic fundamentalism.

He interviewed a number of the detainees in Guantanamo, and he came back saying, “Bad news. The reason we’re not getting better intelligence, part of the reasoning anyway, is that about a third of the people are innocent.” From what he could tell, they were just mistakes. They were locked up—you know, they were just brought in by—herded in by mistake. And—

AMY GOODMAN: Mistake, like, for example, bounty hunters.

JANE MAYER: Right, sure. Bounty hunters who were—you know, and people who were put—there were people put in to—because of personal grudges. There was one—one detainee was there because he had been a teacher of somebody and given them a bad grade, and the person that he’d flunked pointed him out as a terrorist, and he was rounded up.

Whoa, I missed that news.

Nothing like false positives that ruin people’s lives. Remember how Cheney defended his position?

“Those who most urgently advocate that we shut down Guantanamo probably don’t agree with our policy anyway,” the vice president said after presenting the Gerald R. Ford Foundation journalism awards at the National Press Club.

Given all the facts, he said, “Our policy is the correct one.”

In other words, the correct policy is ours, therefore our policy is correct. If you disagree, you become irrelevant by definition.

Any questions? Is there anyone who could grade Cheney’s work? I nominate Henry King Jr. the Nazi war crimes trials prosecutor who has already issued a clear statement on what constitutes a fair trial.