Paul Craig Roberts begins “Washington Is the Source of Terror” with the information that prisoners in Guantanamo whose apprehension was made possible by a bounty/reward campaign run by the U.S., are the subjects of an int’l buy back effort. According to AP’s Chief of Caribbean Services Michelle Faul, Najeeb al-Nauimi is “a former Qatar justice minister and leader of a group of Arab lawyers representing nearly 100 detainees,” and “a consortium of wealthy Arabs, including Saudis, told him they also bought back fellow citizens who had been captured by Pakistanis.”
I doubt the U.S. naively accepted “relief workers, refugees, and Arab businessmen.” Establishing a need for Guantanamo was the objective, and since the administration continues to shamelessly defend these wrongfull incarcerations, I suspect keeping the facility open remains the overriding concern. This buy back campaign is fine and dandy for those who have wealthy benefactors, but what becomes of the stragglers caught in the net who have no such saviour?
Roberts then conflates the pain and suffering of innocents in Bush’s war on terror with that experienced by employees of Arthur Andersen, who he thinks should sue the gov’t for trillions in damages. The firm Roberts describes as “one of America’s greatest assets,” is itself the defendant in at least one class action lawsuit, initiated by employees Nancy J. Roquet and Coretta Robinson, later amended to include all former employees, claiming injury “by Arthur Andersen LLP’s failure to provide 60 days’ warning of its mass layoff or 60 days’ pay as required by the WARN Act.” If the dismantling of Arthur Anderson was well underway before the verdict was rendered, the punishment, a $500,000 fine and 5 years’ probation, it seems the case Roberts desires is based more on emotion than logic, even if the objective is an admirable one.
On the subject of saviours, Michael Scheuer’s opinion on al Qaeda is always usefull, but promoting the fantasy that God is on the side of America isn’t. Why exactly is God on America’s side? As Shadia Drury noted in Hijacking Catastrophe, neoconservatives could very well be jealous of the way in which Islamist fighters embrace death and revere martyrs. Is Scheuer?