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Monday, June 13, 2005

Bush Calls for “Disassembling” Gitmo

Washington—Stunning both critics and supporters, President Bush announced today that the detention camp at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba would be “disassembled” by the end of the month.  “To disassemble—that means to take apart,” the President added.

The surprise announcement came less than two weeks after the President dismissed Amnesty International’s report of human rights abuses at Guantánamo as “absurd,” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the account was “reprehensible,” saying, “No force in the world has done more to liberate people that they have never met than the men and women of the United States military.”

President Bush did not elaborate on the reasons for his decision, but White House press secretary Scott McLellan suggested in a briefing that the Bush administration had recently obtained “credible” evidence that “rogue scientists” were surreptitiously conducting stem-cell research at the Guantánamo facility. 

“Apparently a group of independent contractors got the idea that they could exploit and destroy human embryos in an offshore location,” McLellan told the press.  “The President opposes such research, as I’m sure you well know, because he feels that it is destructive of the culture of life he has tried to foster in his term of office.”

An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, indicated that the so-called “rogue scientists” had descended on Guantánamo in stages over the past two years, and had conducted a series of controversial experiments involving the remediation of spinal cord injuries among the camp’s inmates.

“We don’t know how the prisoners sustained those injuries,” the official added, “but we suspect that they were caused by shoddy reporting by Newsweek.  We do know, however, that these scientists were using Guantánamo as a kind of shield under which to carry out questionable practices that would not be tolerated on the U.S. mainland, and clearly the President had to draw the line.”

The response from Christian leaders and Republican lawmakers was immediate and emphatic.  “It is an outrage that human embryos were subjected to this kind of abuse at an American facility,” said the Rev. James Dobson of Focus on the Family.  Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R–Tenn.) agreed, saying, “There is no excuse for this kind of obscenity.  Every one of those embryos carried the sacred spark of human life, and every American should be ashamed that their human dignity was violated in so systemic and callous a fashion.”

Conservative bloggers quickly joined the chorus, arguing, in the words of University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, that “Amnesty International seems to have flushed its credibility” by not calling attention to the destruction of human embryos, “some of which might well have become the Guantánamo Snowflakes of tomorrow.” Mystery writer Roger L. Simon concurred, noting that “all the time they’ve been getting their panties in a bunch about terrorists undergoing a little sleep deprivation here and there, Amnesty has had nothing to say about the horrific human holocaust occurring on their watch.”

Meanwhile, multiple sources report that at the White House, the dissembling has already begun.

Posted by Michael on 06/13 at 06:08 AM
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