Olbermann On “The Nexus Of Politics And Terror”

Ken AshfordBush & Co., War on Terrorism/TortureLeave a Comment

TerroralertMSNBC’s Keith Olbermann does an excellent story on how the terror alert level goes up whenever the Bush Administration is in trouble, citing thirteen specific examples.

Video here, courtesy of Crooks & Liar.

And if you want to read it, do so here.  Here’s an example:

Number Three:

February 5th, 2003. Secretary of State Powell tells the United Nations Security Council of Iraq’s concealment of weapons, including 18 mobile biological weapons laboratories, justifying a U.N. or U.S. first strike. Many in the UN are doubtful. Months later, much of the information proves untrue.

February 7th, 2003. Two days later, as anti-war demonstrations continue to take place around the globe, Homeland Security Secretary Ridge cites “credible threats” by Al Qaeda, and raises the terror alert level to orange. Three days after that, Fire Administrator David Paulison – who would become the acting head of FEMA after the Hurricane Katrina disaster – advises Americans to stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape to protect themselves against radiological or biological attack.

***

Number Nine:

July 29th, 2004. At their party convention in Boston, the Democrats formally nominate John Kerry as their candidate for President. As in the wake of any convention, the Democrats dominate the media attention over the ensuing weekend.

Monday, August 1st, 2004. The Department of Homeland Security raises the alert status for financial centers in New York, New Jersey, and Washington to orange. The evidence supporting the warning – reconnaissance data, left in a home in Iraq – later proves to be roughly four years old and largely out-of-date.

“Sweet Schadenfreude”

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

Marty Kaplan is right:

This suspense may giving me the heebie-jeebies, but it’s really killing the media.

No one knows who’ll be indicted by Patrick Fitzgerald, but you have to think there’s more than smoke there. Though the Harriet Miers story could play out in any of a dozen ways, all of them are delicious. Frist, Delay, Blunt, Ney and the rest of Jack Abramoff’s butt-boys could actually be in their last throes, and we’re not talking Cheney-like wishful thinking here. It’s really possible that right now, before our eyes, unfolding in slow motion, is a sordid, jaw-dropping story that connects everything from Bolton to Dobson, GannonGuckert to HannityO’Reilly, Florida in 2000 to Ohio in 2004, Enron to Halliburton, lies about the Texas Air National Guard to lies about WMDs. Twenty minutes ago, to hear the media tell it, Rove & Co were geniuses, presiding over a generational shift to the right. Now, they’re lawyering themselves to the gills, and beltway speculation centers on whether the GOP could lose both the House and the Senate in 2006. Yesterday, you had to be some tinfoil hat-wearing Michael Moore type to connect the dots; tomorrow, conceivably, exposing the grand conspiracy will be a recipe for a Pulitzer.

Much as the mainstream media pretend to be disinterested, or even skeptical, the narrative they’ve spun until now has been fawning. They love power, and they love to be loved by the powerful. But Valerie, Terri, Cindy, Katrina and Harriet have finally forced the chattering class to unstrap its kneepads and radically rewrite the story. No one knows how this will all end. But the possibility that the potentates and pundits they’ve slobbered over these past five years will turn out to be perp-walkers and propagandists has forced the media machine to wake up and smell Karl’s Kool-Aid. Their revisionism will be effortless; they’ll retroactively have seen this coming all along. Old conventional wisdom: Oval Office blowjobs means the century of the values voter. New conventional wisdom: Monica was a molehill. Throw the bums out.

It’s still possible, of course, that the black hats will stay in the saddle. But however it turns out, at least the media no longer have to swallow the triumphalist narrative of inevitability these bozos have been peddling.

Another Poll Low

Ken AshfordBush & Co.Leave a Comment

For the first time in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, President Bush’s approval rating "has sunk below 40 percent, while the percentage believing the country is heading in the right direction has dipped below 30 percent.

In addition, a sizable plurality prefers a Democratic-controlled Congress, and just 29 percent think Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers is qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court."

Once again, for your amusement, here is Bush in free fall.

Sekulow’s Hypocrisy

Ken AshfordBush & Co., Supreme CourtLeave a Comment

White House ally and chief counsel to the American Center for Law and Justice, Jay Sekulow (described as one of the “four horseman” who helped Bush select Miers), has been publicly holding up Miers’s faith as a reason she should be confirmed:

[The Miers nomination is] a big opportunity for those of us who have a conviction, that share an evangelical faith in Christianity, to see someone with our positions put on the court. — Jay Sekulow, 10/11/05

In so doing, Sekulow completely contradicted what he said exactly one month earlier about the Roberts nomination:

To make John Roberts’ faith an issue at the coming Senate confirmation hearings would not only be wrong, but a big mistake. — Jay Sekulow, 9/11/05

Harriet Miers Update

Ken AshfordBush & Co., Supreme Court1 Comment

(1)  GOP AIDES COMING OUT AGAINST MIERS

"As the White House seeks to rally senators behind the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, lawyers for the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee are expressing dissatisfaction with the choice and pushing back against her, aides to 6 of the 10 Republican committee members" told the New York Times.

Said one Republican staffer: "Everybody is hoping that something will happen on Miers, either that the president would withdraw her or she would realize she is not up to it and pull out while she has some dignity intact."

(2)  BUSH TO TRY NEW STRATEGY BY ATTACKING CONSERVATIVES?

David Frum:

Even more ominously, the Today show interview announces a new strategy of trying to win the Miers nomination by waging war on the president’s core supporters. In the first week of the battle, the White House sent out James Dobson to woo evangelical conservatives. That didn’t work out too well. So now the White House has switched strategies. It has turned its back on conservative evangelicals and is instead using Laura Bush to woo suburban moderates. But remember: Laura Bush is on record as a supporter – not just of abortion rights – but of the Roe v. Wade decision. Interviewed on the Today program in January 2001, Mrs. Bush was asked point blank about the case. Her answer: "No, I don’t think it should be overturned." Is it credible that Mrs. Bush would be endorsing Harriet Miers if the first lady thought that Miers would really do what James Dobson thinks she’ll do?

It is madness for a 37% president to declare war on his strongest supporters, but that is exactly the strategy that this unwise nomination has forced upon President Bush. And every day that passes, he will get angrier, the attacks will get fiercer – and his political position will weaken.

(3)  DOBSON SPEAKS

From Focus On The Family website:

"Well, my reasons for supporting her were twofold, John. First, because Karl Rove had shared with me her judicial philosophy which was consistent with the promises that President Bush had made when he was campaigning. Now he told the voters last year that he would select people to be on the Court who would interpret the law rather than create it and judges who would not make social policy from the bench. Most of all, the President promised to appoint people who would uphold the Constitution and not use their powers to advance their own political agenda. Now, Mr. Rove assured me in that telephone conversation that Harriet Miers fit that description and that the President knew her well enough to say so with complete confidence.

Then he suggested that I might want to validate that opinion by talking to people in Texas who knew Miers personally and he gave me the names of some individuals that I could call. And I quickly followed up on that conversation and got glowing reports from a federal judge in Texas, Ed Kinkeade and a Texas Supreme Court justice, Nathan Hecht, who is highly respected and has known Harriet Miers for more than 25 years. And so, we talked to him and we talked to some others who are acquainted with Ms. Miers."

Did they talk about Miers’ views on abortion?  Rove talking to Dobson is not a privileged converstaion.  Dobson needs to be subpoenaed!!

UPDATE:  Bush gives this unsatisfactory explanation:

President Bush said Wednesday his advisers were telling conservatives about Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers’ religious beliefs because they are interested in her background and "part of Harriet Miers’ life is her religion."

"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Bush told reporters at the White House. "They want to know Harriet Miers’ background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers’ life is her religion."

Her religion should have nothing to do with her judicial opinions.  Bush should say so, and more importantly, she should say so.

(4)  IT WAS CARD’S IDEA

From the National Journal:

Is it just us or is there already a storyline developing about ‘who’s to blame for Miers’"? And if so, is WH CoS Andrew Card about to be on the wrong end of this blame game?

This scenario holds Card responsible for pushing President Bush to select Miers, for pushing her through the vetting process secretly, inartfully, and incompletely, and for screwing up the outreach to conservatives.

Republicans close to the process have marveled at how the White House seems to be chasing information about Miers it reads in the press, rather than framing it. "It’s as if," one adviser who is sympathetic to Miers told The Hotline today, "they don’t know anything about her."

Update: Newsweek’s Howard Fineman speaks of a civil war between the potential Fitzgerald indictees (Rove, Libby) and Card, who reps the interests of the Bush family.

Read on…

A day after the Miers pick was announced, a tick-tock credited Card with beginning the "secret" Miers vetting process after Bush asked him to assess Miers as a potential nominee.

Then consider: a "Bush adviser" told Time late last week that "[t]his is something that Andy and the President cooked up. Andy knew it would appeal to the President because he loves appointing his own people and being supersecret and stealthy about it."

The Kansas City Star picked up the item.

Erick Erickson, a conservative lawyer with close ties to current members of the White House staff (and who was among the first among those plugged in to float Miers’ name) has a post today based on conversations with numerous sources. "What all the callers wanted to say, but then decided they should not say, or at least not be quoted saying, was that Andy Card really and truly was the person pushing Miers."

Erick Erickson’s post on Miers is revealing for other things it says, i.e.,:

"One outside source who has a good ear to the ground tells me that the White House most likely has nothing else to offer in Miers’ favor, but will just recycle previous sound bites"

and that the

"vetting process was so poorly done that much of what is now coming out about Miers was unknown before her nomination."

(5)  PAT ROBERTSON MAKING NOT-SO-VEILED THREATS:

Robertson70 “These so-called movement conservatives don’t have much of a following, the ones that I’m aware of. And you just marvel, these are the senators, some of them who voted to confirm the general counsel of the ACLU to the Supreme Court, and she was voted in almost unanimously. And you say, ‘now they’re going to turn against a Christian who is a conservative picked by a conservative President and they’re going to vote against her for confirmation.’ Not on your sweet life, if they want to stay in office.”

– Source

From The “No Duh” Department

Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

USA Today reports:

CIA review faults prewar plans

By John Diamond, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — A newly released report published by the CIA rebukes the Bush administration for not paying enough attention to prewar intelligence that predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq.

Policymakers worried more about making the case for the war, particularly the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, than planning for the aftermath, the report says. The report was written by a team of four former CIA analysts led by former deputy CIA director Richard Kerr.

"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write.

Matt Yglesius is right:

[I]t’s a bit silly. One hardly needed access to "prewar intelligence" to realize that Iraq contained several different ethnic and sectarian groups, that these groups had different visions of the country, and that there was likely to be a problem in this neighborhood. Nor is it especially fair to blame "the Bush administration" as such for failing to pay more attention to this issue. The administration should, of course, have paid more attention but so should the small army of pundits and so forth who were arguing about the war. As I say, secret intelligence and awesome cloak-and-dagger spying is hardly what’s at issue here — it’s a question of basic knowledge.

WHIGing Out

Ken AshfordIraqLeave a Comment

This is an off-shoot from the Fitzgerald/Plame investigation, and has implications that are even bigger than the Downing Street Memos.

Read this (pdf) report called "Truth from These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological Operations in Gulf II," written by Colonel Sam Gardiner who identified 50 false news stories created and leaked by a secretive White House propaganda apparatus. Here’s a news story about it:

According to Gardiner, "It was not bad intelligence" that lead to the quagmire in Iraq, "It was an orchestrated effort [that] began before the war" that was designed to mislead the public and the world. Gardiner’s research lead him to conclude that the US and Britain had conspired at the highest levels to plant "stories of strategic influence" that were known to be false.

The Times of London described the $200-million-plus US operation as a "meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein."

The multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign run out of the White House and Defense Department was, in Gardiner’s final assessment "irresponsible in parts" and "might have been illegal."

"Washington and London did not trust the peoples of their democracies to come to the right decisions," Gardiner explains. Consequently, "Truth became a casualty. When truth is a casualty, democracy receives collateral damage." For the first time in US history, "we allowed strategic psychological operations to become part of public affairs… [W]hat has happened is that information warfare, strategic influence, [and] strategic psychological operations pushed their way into the important process of informing the peoples of our two democracies."

It was this story that the White House didn’t want exposed and when Joe Wilson started making noises about Dick Cheney and yellowcake, they got very nervous. After all, the WMD’s weren’t turning up in Iraq.

This is all reminiscent of Watergate.  Remember, Nixon attemted to bury the Watergate investigation NOT because he was concerned about the break-in, but because it might lead to the exposure of other White House "dirty tricks".

If the President & Vice-President lie, and lead our nation into a disastrous war, what’s the remedy?  Can impeachment be far behind?

According to a new poll, just out, the American people say "impeachment".

That’s good — that’s what the Constitution says, too.

50% of adult Americans agreed with this statement:
"If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

39% agree strongly.
72% of Democrats favor impeachment. 56% of Independents do, too.
Even 20% of Republicans (is the cult crumbling?).

UPDATE:  Coutesy of Think Progress, here’s what we know already about WHIG (White House Iraq Group) members:

Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney Scooter Libby: Visited the CIA to press them for information about uranium sales to Iraq. Helped prepare CIA director George Tenet’s response to criticism about faulty intelligence included in the President’s State of the Union address. Spoke with Time reporter Matt Cooper and New York Times reporter Judith Miller about Valerie Wilson’s role at the CIA. Testified before the grand jury. [Link]

National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley: Received an email from Rove about his conversation with Matt Cooper. Was warned by the CIA not the cite uranium evidence. Helped prepare CIA director George Tenet’s response to criticism about faulty intelligence included in the President’s State of the Union address. Believed to have been questioned by special prosecutor. [Link]

Chief of Staff Andrew Card: Received 12-hour head start on Justice Department investigation. Was on Air Force one with State Department memo describing Valerie Wilson’s role at CIA. Initiated conversation between Tenet and Bush about investigation. Believed to have been questioned by special prosecutor. [Link]

Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove: Spoke with Time reporter Matt Cooper and columnist Robert Novak about Valerie Wilson’s role at the CIA. Helped prepare CIA director George Tenet’s response to criticism about faulty intelligence included in the President’s State of the Union address. Testified before the grand jury. [Link]

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: In July 2003 received a briefing book that may have contained a State Department memo discussing Valerie Wilson’s role at the CIA. Appeared on Sunday shows to “protect Cheney by explaining that he had had nothing to do with sending Wilson to Niger, and dismiss the yellowcake issue.” Questioned by special prosecutor. [Link]

Senior Advisor Mary Matalin: Worked closely with Vice-President Cheney. Testified before grand jury. [Link]

Communications Director Dan Bartlett: Was on Air Force one with State Department memo describing Valerie Wilson’s role at CIA. Longstanding ties to Rove. Offered contradictory explanation of infamous “16 words.” [Link]

White House Aide Karen Hughes: Denied Rove’s involvement in leak. Helped draft State of the Union Addess with false uranium claim. Interviewed with Fitzgerald. [Link]

Frist Stock Problem Worse

Ken AshfordCongress, RepublicansLeave a Comment

Things are getting worse for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, currently under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for an insider trading and stock dumping scandal involving shares of his family’s company, HCA. Frist has defended himself by pointing out that his stocks are in a blind trust, eliminating any conflicts of interest. However, it now seems that Frist has been holding stocks outside of this blind trust all along:

Outside the blind trusts he created to avoid a conflict of interest, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist earned tens of thousands of dollars from stock in a family-founded hospital chain largely controlled by his brother, documents show.

The Tennessee Republican, whose sale this summer of HCA Inc. stock is under federal investigation, has long maintained he could own HCA shares and still vote on health care legislation without a conflict because he had placed the stock in blind trusts approved by the Senate.

However, ethics experts say a partnership arrangement shown in documents obtained by The Associated Press raises serious doubts about whether the senator truly avoided a conflict.

Plamegate Update

Ken AshfordPlamegate2 Comments

Looks like Fitzgerald is casting a pretty wide net.  That’s the rumors anyway.  And in the wake of it all, there seems to be a power play in the White House — Andrew Card angling to fill Rove’s shoes.  Josh Marshall sums it up:

There are certainly a lot of hints, allegations and murmurs out there tonight, particularly on the bloggier part of the web, about what might be coming down the pike from Patrick Fitzgerald.  My favorite is this snippet from Hardball — caught and excerped on John Aravosis’ AmericaBlog — which has Howard Fineman describing an alleged pre-indictment (political) death struggle pitting Karl Rove against Andy Card.

Gotta love that. Whether it’s true or not, who knows?

In any case, an article (sub.req.) in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal contains this pleasant sounding sentence: "Mr. Fitzgerald’s pursuit now suggests he might be investigating not a narrow case on the leaking of the agent’s name, but perhaps a broader conspiracy."

And then further down there’s this: "Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group. Formed in August 2002, the group, which included Messrs. Rove and Libby, worked on setting strategy for selling the war in Iraq to the public in the months leading up to the March 2003 invasion. The group likely would have played a significant role in responding to Mr. Wilson’s claims."

First of all, it did play a big role. That’s where the push back came from.

If this description is accurate, it must have many folks at the White House in cold sweats.

If Karl Rove goes down in this investigation it’ll be a disaster for the president, both in terms of the damage occasioned by such a high-level White House indictment and, frankly, because he needs the guy like most of us need legs.

But this WHIG thing is a whole ‘nother level of hurt.

This group was the organizational team, the core group behind all the shameless crap that went down in the lead up to the Iraq war — the lies about the cooked up Niger story, everything. If Fitzgerald has lassoed this operation into a criminal conspiracy, the veil of protective secrecy in which the whole operation is still shrouded will be pulled back. Depositions and sworn statements in on-going investigations have a way of doing that. Ask Bill Clinton. Every key person in the White House will be touched by it. And all sorts of ugly tales could spill out.

Then, of course, there is the news about Judy Miller’s recently-discovered notes, which make trouble for Scooter Libby:

In two appearances before the federal grand jury investigating the leak of a covert CIA operative’s name, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, did not disclose a crucial conversation that he had with New York Times reporter Judith Miller in June 2003 about the operative, Valerie Plame, according to sources with firsthand knowledge of his sworn testimony.

Smurfs Get Bombed

Ken AshfordWar on Terrorism/Torture2 Comments

Smurfbomb Seriously:

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — Out of an idyllic blue sky dotted with birds and butterflies come warplanes that carpet-bomb the Smurfs’ forest village, killing Smurfette, leaving Baby Smurf wailing in distress and sending Papa Smurf and the others bolting for cover.

The scene from a bizarre commercial featuring Belgium’s lovable blue-skinned cartoon characters is so upsetting it can only be shown after 9 p.m. to avoid scaring children.

Yet it is part of a UNICEF ad campaign on Belgian television meant to highlight the plight of ex-child soldiers in Africa.

"It’s working. We are getting a lot of reactions, and people are logging on to our Web site," said Philippe Henon, a spokesman for the Belgian office of the U.N. children’s agency.

Cheney Days

Ken AshfordBush & Co., PlamegateLeave a Comment

Sure, the value of Cheney’s Halliburton stock options have increased 3281% in the past year (from $241,498 to over $8,000,000), but it won’t do him much good if this is true:

The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are working on stories that point to Vice President Dick Cheney as the target of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name. Developing…

UPDATE:  Cheney a no-show at dinner festivities

UPDATE:  Okay, maybe Cheney isn’t in trouble after all…., but it looks like the conspiracy net is still pretty wide.

The Ig Nobel Prizes

Ken AshfordScience & TechnologyLeave a Comment

Winners were announced last weekend.  Some of my favorites:

FOR PHYSICS:

John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

REFERENCE: "The Pitch Drop Experiment," R. Edgeworth, B.J. Dalton and T. Parnell, European Journal of Physics, 1984, pp. 198-200.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: John Mainstone

FOR ECONOMICS:

Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Gauri Nanda

FOR BIOLOGY:

Benjamin Smith of the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Toronto, Canada and the Firmenich perfume company, Geneva, Switzerland, and ChemComm Enterprises, Archamps, France; Craig Williams of James Cook University and the University of South Australia; Michael Tyler of the University of Adelaide; Brian Williams of the University of Adelaide; and Yoji Hayasaka of the Australian Wine Research Institute; for painstakingly smelling and cataloging the peculiar odors produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed.

REFERENCE: "A Survey of Frog Odorous Secretions, Their Possible Functions and Phylogenetic Significance," Benjamin P.C. Smith, Craig R. Williams, Michael J. Tyler, and Brian D. Williams, Applied Herpetology, vol. 2, no. 1-2, February 1, 2004, pp. 47-82.

REFERENCE: "Chemical and Olfactory Characterization of Odorous Compounds and Their Precursors in the Parotoid Gland Secretion of the Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea," Benjamin P.C. Smith, Michael J. Tyler, Brian D. Williams, and Yoji Hayasaka, Journal of Chemical Ecology, vol. 29, no. 9, September 2003.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Ben Smith and Craig Williams

FOR CHEMISTRY:

Edward Cussler of the University of Minnesota and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin, for conducting a careful experiment to settle the longstanding scientific question: can people swim faster in syrup or in water?

REFERENCE: "Will Humans Swim Faster or Slower in Syrup?" American Institute of Chemical Engineers Journal, Brian Gettelfinger and E. L. Cussler, vol. 50, no. 11, October 2004, pp. 2646-7.

WHO ATTENDED THE IG NOBEL CEREMONY: Brian Gettelfinger and Edward Cussler

Full list of winners and clips of awards ceremonies can be found here.

An American GI Speaks About Being Tortured By Americans GIs

Ken AshfordWar on Terrorism/TortureLeave a Comment

From the Sunday Times:

James Yee entered Guantanamo as a patriotic US officer and Muslim chaplain. He ended up in shackles, branded a spy. This is his disturbing story

My cell was 8ft by 6ft, the same size as the detainees’ cages at Guantanamo. Barely a week ago I had received a glowing evaluation for my work as the US army’s Muslim chaplain among the “Gitmo” prisoners. Now I was the one in chains.

It was my turn to be humiliated every time I was taken to have a shower. Naked, I had to run my hands through my hair to show that I was not concealing a weapon in it. Then mouth open, tongue up, down, nothing inside. Right arm up, nothing in my armpit. Left arm up. Lift the right testicle, nothing hidden. Lift the left. Turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks, knowing a camera was displaying my naked image as male and female guards watched.

It didn’t matter that I was an army captain, a graduate of West Point, the elite US military academy. It didn’t matter that my religious beliefs prohibited me from being fully naked in front of strangers. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been charged with a crime. It didn’t matter that my wife and daughter had no idea where I was. And it certainly didn’t matter that I was a loyal American citizen and, above all, innocent.

I was accused of mutiny and sedition, aiding the enemy and espionage, all of which carried the death penalty. I was regarded as a traitor to the army and my country. This was all blatantly untrue — as would be proved when, after a long fight, all the charges against me were dropped and I won an honourable discharge from the army.

I knew why I had been arrested: it was because I am a Muslim. I was just the latest victim of the hostility born the moment when the planes flew into the twin towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

My real “crime” had been that I had tried to ensure that the suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters detained in the Gitmo cages were given every opportunity to practise their religion freely, one of the most fundamental of American ideals.

I had monitored the atrocious treatment meted out by the guards. And I had come to suspect that my appointment as the prisoners’ chaplain was simply a piece of political theatre.

When reporters came to Guantanamo on the media tour, everyone had always wanted to talk to the Muslim chaplain. I had told them the things that the command expected me to say. We give the detainees a Koran. We announce the prayer five times a day. We serve halal food. Everything I said had been true. But it certainly wasn’t the full story.

I HAVE NOT always been a Muslim. I am a third-generation American — my grandparents left China in the 1920s — and as a child in New Jersey I grudgingly attended Lutheran church services with my mother.

Read the whole thing.