[News] El País and NY Times on Wikileaks Guantánamo : From Casios to shwarma

[Anti-Imperialist News]

El País and NY Times on Wikileaks Guantánamo: From Casios to shwarma

Posted on 
<http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/el-pais-and-ny-times-on-wikileaks-guantanamo-from-casios-to-shwarma/>April 
27, 2011 by <http://machetera.wordpress.com/author/machetera/>machetera
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/el-pais-and-ny-times-on-wikileaks-guantanamo-from-casios-to-shwarma/

You know that things are going from bad to worse 
when the spin coming from the newspaper of record 
in Franco’s country* on the newly leaked files 
from the U.S. concentration camp in Guantánamo, 
Cuba, looks like it was written up by leftists in 
comparison to the NY Times version.  Purely by 
accident I happened to read the 
<http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/abusos/Guantanamo/descubierto/elpepuint/20110425elpepuint_4/Tes>El 
País<http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/abusos/Guantanamo/descubierto/elpepuint/20110425elpepuint_4/Tes> 
version first, where I learned that some of those 
imprisoned at the camp were considered by their 
captors to have received explosives training 
based on nothing more than the fact that they wore Casio F91W wristwatches.

Which is absurd because the U.S. Army (the 
world’s original explosives trainers) knows 
perfectly well that real explosives experts like 
Posada Carriles and his fellow traveler Felix 
Rodríguez prefer Rolex’s, especially 
<http://afrocubaweb.com/felixrodriguez.htm>ones 
stolen from their murder victims.  And then you 
also have to wonder, Casio F91W’s anyone?  During 
the German occupation of Denmark, King Christian 
X was said to have responded to the German decree 
that all Jews wear yellow stars of David by 
donning one himself and encouraging all Danes to 
do the same.  It’s an 
<http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/denmark.asp>urban 
legend, but the fact that Danes helped most Jews 
escape to Sweden is not.  The 
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000GAWSDG/ref=nosim/kkorg-20>Casio 
F91W is an ugly little thing, but it’s cheap.

So then I went to see what the Times had to say 
about the Casios.  Nothing actually.  But before 
looking up that story, I looked over the one 
where the Times 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world/guantanamo-files-wikileaks-loses-control-of-some-secrets.html>gloats 
about undercutting Julian Assange’s business by getting its leaks elsewhere.

[Wikileaks] has become such a large player in 
journalism that some of its secrets are no longer its own to control.

Can you imagine Times editor Bill Keller laughing 
maniacally while he wrote dictated that?

Since it’s a well known fact that Assange prefers 
not to do business with the Times I wanted to see 
how they referred to their new source – who 
naturally no-one has mentioned suffering the same 
fate as Bradley Manning.  As you’d expect, they 
were coy, but draw your own conclusions:

Unknown, at first, to the WikiLeaks partners, The 
Times had independently obtained the files from a 
source Mr. Keller would not name, and shared them 
with both The Guardian and NPR.

It’s true that there are only about half a 
million possible leakers but, State Department, anyone?

So then, on to the Times spin on the Guantánano files themselves.

Here are the first two sentences from the El País 
article (sorry but I’m not going to translate the whole thing):

A police and penal system without guarantees was 
created at Guantánamo in which only two questions 
mattered: how much information might be obtained 
from the prisoners, even though they might be 
innocent, and whether they might be dangerous in 
the future.  Elderly men with senile dementia, 
adolescents, severe pyschiatric cases and 
teachers or farmers with no connection whatsoever 
to jihad were taken to the prison and mixed with 
real terrorists, such as those responsible for 9/11.

Compare the Times version:

A trove of more than 700 classified military 
documents provides new and detailed accounts of 
the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay 
prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the 
evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Not until the end of the second paragraph do we learn:

the leaked files show why, by laying bare the 
patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many 
cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

Some of the prisoners, the Times informs us, had violent thoughts!

One detainee said “he would like to tell his 
friends in Iraq to find the interrogator, slice 
him up, and make a shwarma (a type of sandwich) 
out of him, with the interrogator’s head sticking 
out of the end of the shwarma.”

Oh call me crazy, but considering that the Times 
preceded this revelation with another about 
interrogators leashing a prisoner like a dog, 
sexually humiliating him and forcing him to 
urinate on himself, a human shwarma revenge 
fantasy strikes me as not very unusual.  Or newsworthy really.

Speaking of which
time for lunch.

*They say Franco’s dead and Spain’s better now, but I’m not so sure.




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