But Had “President Aggressively” Had His Way…

The BBC reports:

A video of a 16-year-old detainee being questioned at the US’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp has been released for the first time.

The video, released by Omar Khadr’s lawyers, reportedly shows him being asked by Canadian officials in 2003 about events leading to his capture by US forces…

Reuters also tells us:

…His lawyers said he suffered “torture and abuse” including sleep deprivation and threats of rape…

Apparently, none of that took place during this interrogation interview, which his lawyers released. But, in viewing it, one supposes we are meant to be moved in some manner. And yes, this blog is.

It is moving to see how softly-softly they are treating him, speaking to him as if he were merely another kid taken to the headmaster’s office. Which would seem, of course, definitive evidence of, in the words of a Rolling Stone magazine piece in 2006, the “unspeakable abuse sanctioned” by the current president. According to Reuters, presumably this is also:

Osama bin Laden’s former driver took the stand on Tuesday at the U.S. military war court where he faces trial next week and described isolation, sleep deprivation and sexual impropriety during nearly seven years of captivity.

It was the first time prisoner Salim Hamdan, who challenged President George W. Bush and won, testified before the war court at the remote U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…

…His lawyer, Charles Swift, walked his client through his captivity from his capture in Afghanistan in November 2001, where he said he was beaten, to his years at Guantanamo where he reluctantly described how a female interrogator had touched him while soldiers stood nearby.

“She came very close with her whole body towards me,” Hamdan said through an interpreter, his eyes downcast at times.

Pressed by Swift for details, he said: “She touched me above the knee.” “Where?” Swift asked. “Did she touch your thigh?” “Yes,” he said, adding that he began answering her questions after she implied she was going to touch his groin…

“Isolation?” “Sleep deprivation? “Sexual impropriety?” “Threats of rape?” Curious, but after hearing for years from every direction on the truly endless, appalling and simply indescribable abuse all there have somehow endured, day and night, most readers would likely have had rather something more in mind.

Still, given the circumstances surrounding how young Khadr and Mr Hamdan ended up in U.S. clutches in the first place, they are surely egregiously unlucky in having to cope in that chamber of horrors. Indeed, as we learn increasingly about their inept and pointless confinement, have we also perhaps stumbled upon a separate indictment as to the handling of the conflict there? After all, we are told also (and can readily see for ourselves, in the above) that the, one might say, “touchy-feely” junta of President George (“Soft Afghan War”) Bush has always pursued the Afghan campaign dimheadedly, without vigor and killing determination.

Ah, but given his oft-stated desire to annihilate the enemy there with extreme prejudice, if one Senator (“Two Brigades More”) Obama had been president back in 2001-2002. . .

…”I continue to believe that we’re under-resourced in Afghanistan,” he said. “That is the real centre for terrorist activity that we have to deal with and deal with aggressively.”…

. . . as commander-in-chief he would have certainly seen to it that U.S. forces had “cut out their living guts, and used them to grease the treads of our tanks.” Doing so would likely have resulted in the remaining body parts of both by now long being happily forgotten and silently decomposing on some Afghan hillside. Instead, alas, they are abusively caged by the inept Bush: how sad for them.