Murder at Camp Delta is a new book by Joseph Hickman, a
former guard at Guantanamo. It’s neither fiction nor speculation. When
President Obama says “We tortured some folks,” Hickman provides at least
three cases — in addition to many others we know about from secret
sites around the world — in which the statement needs to be modified to
“We murdered some folks.” Of course, murder is supposed to be acceptable
in war (and in whatever you call what Obama does with drones) while
torture is supposed to be, or used to be, a scandal. But what about
tortures to death? What about deadly human experimentation? Does that
have a Nazi enough ring to disturb anyone?
We should be able to answer that question soon, at least for that segment of the population that searches aggressively for news or actually — I’m not making this up — reads books. Murder at Camp Delta is a book of, by, and for true believers in patriotism and militarism. You can start out viewing Dick Cheney as a leftist and never be offended by this book, unless documented facts that the author himself was deeply disturbed to discover offend you. The first line of the book is “I am a patriotic American.” The author never retracts it. Following a riot at Guantanamo, which he led the suppression of, he observes:
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We should be able to answer that question soon, at least for that segment of the population that searches aggressively for news or actually — I’m not making this up — reads books. Murder at Camp Delta is a book of, by, and for true believers in patriotism and militarism. You can start out viewing Dick Cheney as a leftist and never be offended by this book, unless documented facts that the author himself was deeply disturbed to discover offend you. The first line of the book is “I am a patriotic American.” The author never retracts it. Following a riot at Guantanamo, which he led the suppression of, he observes:
“As much as I blamed the inmates for the riot, I respected how hard they’d fought. They were ready to fight nearly to the death. If we had been running a good detention facility, I would have thought they were motivated by strong religious or political ideals. The sad truth was that they probably fought so hard because our poor facilities and shabby treatment had pushed them beyond normal human limits. Their motivation might not have been radical Islam at all but the simple fact that they had nothing to live for and nothing left to lose.”As far as I know, Hickman has not yet applied the same logic to debunking the absurd pretense that people fight back in Afghanistan or Iraq because their religion is murderous or because they hate us for our freedoms. Hickman will be a guest on Talk Nation Radio soon, so perhaps I’ll ask him. But first I’ll thank him. And not for his “service.” For his book.
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