Home | Away

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 on 06/13 at 06:08 AM

  1. I open up Michael’s blog this morning and discover that he is back and in top form.

    Posted by Jeremy Osner  on  06/13  at  09:44 AM

  2. Agreed, Jeremy, but I’ll admit I was kind of hoping he’d start with some of his trademark satire rather than this straight news item.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/13  at  09:53 AM

  3. Is it just me or can anyone else not find this story in the news?  I’m thinking satire indeed…

    Posted by Will  on  06/13  at  10:02 AM

  4. There’s no way a man with a Pratt-Whitney drain (or is it Briggs-Stratton drain?) is strong enough for satire.  Maybe some glancing parody, or a weak pun, but not full blown satire.  So this has to be real.  And with apologies to Dave Barry, wouldn’t “Guantanamo Snowflakes” be a great band name.

    Posted by corndog  on  06/13  at  10:19 AM

  5. I understand Nicholas Kristoff is readying his op-ed column in the NY Times that shows how feminists have, as usual, failed to show outrage over this abuse of human life at Guantanamo.  How dare they maintain their silence for so long?

    Welcome back, Michael.

    Posted by Mitchell J. Freedman  on  06/13  at  11:02 AM

  6. "It’s funny because it’s true.”—Homer J. Simpson

    Welcome back, Michael.

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  11:07 AM

  7. Somwhere in the universe, the spirits of Voltaire and Mark Twain are beeming proudly.

    Satire is not dead!

    It’s good to see you writing again, Professor Bérubé!

    Posted by mat  on  06/13  at  11:46 AM

  8. Satire or truth? With this administration of “disassemblers”, who can tell?

    Welcome back!

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  12:31 PM

  9. From the looks of it, Corndog it’s a Myers-Briggs drain.

    I mean just look at this place. Puddles of ENTP all over the floor.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/13  at  12:33 PM

  10. Michael,

    Welcome back!

    Good to see no satirical bones were removed in your procedure. Thanks for the laugh.

    Scott

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  12:38 PM

  11. It’s great news that the infection did not affect your snark bladder.

    Welcome back!

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  12:52 PM

  12. Glad you’re back, Michael. But, I’m off the airport right now and I’ll have to read this shit when I hit the runway in Bland-e-eggo.

    Posted by Roxanne  on  06/13  at  01:25 PM

  13. Back and in grand form.

    Posted by The Centerfielder  on  06/13  at  01:28 PM

  14. To: Chris Clarke
    Re: Michael’s Myers-Briggs profile

    E - Most definitely
    N - Probably
    T - Yeah, baby!
    P - Oh no, I’ve got to think J, because he doesn’t just perceive the idiotic behavior, he judges it.  Righteously.

    Posted by corndog  on  06/13  at  02:19 PM

  15. I was kind of on the cusp of going with J over P, but it’s hard to tell with these pomo guys sometimes. Second-guessing their tendency to judge as a way to deconstruct their social POV, or cloaking their righteous judgement under fine layers of carefully woven relativism? You be the judge.

    Also, someone with more time than I have right now should make a “Michael Myers Briggs Stratton” joke comment.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/13  at  02:28 PM

  16. More than anything, this reads like the mind’s attempt to knit together all of the things it overheard while floating just under the surface of consciousness…

    Welcome back Michael.  Or, perhaps, wake up soon.

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  03:33 PM

  17. Right, NYSusan: this post reassembles--that means “looks like"--just such a knitting-together process.

    Well, we tease him a lot, but we’ve got him on the spot-- welcome back!

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  04:05 PM

  18. Coulter tried to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy, so now Bush is resurrecting Mengele?

    Posted by Linkmeister  on  06/13  at  05:21 PM

  19. You are back!!! You are quite a talented satirist!!!  You are an inspiration to me, in an involved with someone else so I can say that way!  I look forward to more of your inspiration soon!  Tell John he did a good job while you were away!

    Posted by Betty Blogger  on  06/13  at  05:40 PM

  20. Nobody can tell a story quite the way you can!  Welcome back wink

    Posted by DK  on  06/13  at  06:17 PM

  21. So, that is what would get Bush upset?
    Welcome Back.
    We need the “real news.”
    Remember, satire is very, very, very hard work.

    Posted by  on  06/13  at  09:01 PM

  22. Ah. Das Beard.  Maybe Norbiz was right all along about the mysterious resemblance you have with Jürgen Prochnow

    Posted by corndog  on  06/14  at  10:36 AM

  23. Welcome back! Blog-reading is not the same without you.

    Posted by  on  06/14  at  11:53 AM

  24. Thanks for the hearty welcome, folks!  And you all made me so curious about the Myers-Briggs drain that I went and took the damn test.  Those of you who said J were right.  But the real surprises were the very low E (1) and the low F (12).  So I’m actually an ENFJ, which in New York City SubwaySpeak describes a really roundabout way of getting from Jamaica Center in Queens to midtown Manhattan and then back to Jamaica Center again.  In the Myers-Briggs lingo, it means I have feelings too, you know!!!

    Posted by Michael  on  06/14  at  12:52 PM

Name:

Email:

Location:

URL:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Submit the word you see below:


Next entry: Housekeeping

Previous entry: And Now at Last

<< Back to main