Inside Camp Delta

In the Guardian's ongoing special report on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, James Meek has a two-part analysis of the situation in Camp Delta. In the first part, he offered this frightening possible reason for the existence of the detention camp:

But, as US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the military in a revealing slip in April 2002, "We have been successful in not eliminating al-Qaida." Having failed to find the suspected mastermind behind 9/11, Osama bin Laden, his Taliban ally, Mullah Omar, or much in the way of terrorist infrastructure, the US set about constructing, behind razor wire on a secure Caribbean island, an incarcerated model of what its "war on terror" rhetoric implies. It has gathered terrorism suspects from all over the world, imposed discipline and order on them, encouraged them to hate the US and kept them together for years. It was as if the Bush administration so wanted the Hollywood fantasy of a central terrorist campus to be true that they built it themselves.

I am not the only person to have chosen this particular quote, as it happens, but as I didn't get this from another blog, and in fact was going to post it yesterday but it didn't work on my work computer, I have no reason to credit anyone other than the Guardian. But it gives me a feeling sort of like warm fuzzies to see all these people I never met who think along the same lines.