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<h1><font size=4><b>El País and NY Times on Wikileaks Guantánamo: From
Casios to shwarma</b></font></h1><font size=3>Posted on
<a href="http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/el-pais-and-ny-times-on-wikileaks-guantanamo-from-casios-to-shwarma/">
April 27, 2011</a> by
<a href="http://machetera.wordpress.com/author/machetera/">machetera</a>
<br>
<a href="http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/el-pais-and-ny-times-on-wikileaks-guantanamo-from-casios-to-shwarma/" eudora="autourl">
http://machetera.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/el-pais-and-ny-times-on-wikileaks-guantanamo-from-casios-to-shwarma/<br>
<br>
</a>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 <i>NY Times</i>
version. Purely by accident I happened to read the
<a href="http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/abusos/Guantanamo/descubierto/elpepuint/20110425elpepuint_4/Tes">
<i>El
País</a></i>
<a href="http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/abusos/Guantanamo/descubierto/elpepuint/20110425elpepuint_4/Tes">
version</a> 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.<br><br>
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 <a href="http://afrocubaweb.com/felixrodriguez.htm">ones
stolen from their murder victims</a>. 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
<a href="http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/denmark.asp">urban
legend</a>, but the fact that Danes helped most Jews escape to Sweden is
not. The
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000GAWSDG/ref=nosim/kkorg-20">
Casio F91W is an ugly little thing, but it’s cheap</a>.<br><br>
So then I went to see what the<i> Times</i> had to say about the
Casios. Nothing actually. But before looking up that story, I
looked over the one where the <i>Times</i>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/world/guantanamo-files-wikileaks-loses-control-of-some-secrets.html">
gloats about undercutting Julian Assange’s business</a> by getting its
leaks elsewhere.<br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>[Wikileaks] has become such a large player in journalism that some of
its secrets are no longer its own to control.<br><br>
</dl>Can you imagine Times</i> editor Bill Keller laughing maniacally
while he wrote dictated that?<br><br>
Since it’s a well known fact that Assange prefers not to do business with
the Times</i> 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:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>It’s true that there are only about half a million possible leakers
but, State Department, anyone?<br><br>
So then, on to the Times</i> spin on the Guantánano files
themselves.<br><br>
Here are the first two sentences from the El País</i> article (sorry but
I’m not going to translate the whole thing):<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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</i> were taken to the
prison and mixed with real terrorists, such as those responsible for
9/11.<br><br>
</dl>Compare the Times</i> version:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>Not until the end of the second paragraph do we learn:<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>Some of the prisoners, the Times</i> informs us, had violent
thoughts!<br><br>
<dl>
<dd>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.”<br><br>
</dl>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.<br><br>
Speaking of which…time for lunch.<br><br>
*They say Franco’s dead and Spain’s better now, but I’m not so
sure.<br><br>
<br><br>
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