Guantanamo Teach-in

I attended a session of a Guantanamo Bay Teach-in. In this session there was a panel of three journalists discussing their point of view of
Guantanamo
Bay.

The journalists, one from the Miami Herald, one from the New Yorker and one from Time magazine, talked about how there has been limited access at
Guantanamo
Bay for reporters. They said this makes it difficult to report on the situation there.            

After 9-11, reporters were brought to
Guantanamo. The reporter from the Miami Herald said it was like a dog pound for the detainees. She also said that reporters were embedded in certain areas. She thought that it was in hopes that the reporters would become more sympathetic towards the way the
US military was operating. She also thought that they wanted the reporters to show that the military was trying to get information out of the people held there in order to achieve justice. Criticism of torture was not expected, she said. I thought this was interesting. I guess the opinion of the American public was a little skewed after 9-11.            

The reporter from the New Yorker said the reason for the lack of criticism was the critics of the administration were kept out of the decision-making. They had a false sense that they were not doing something controversial. She also stated that the administration approved of “psychological gambit”; they did not think this was necessarily torture.            

The reporters talked about how the administration has justified torture being used by the amount of information they have gotten out of the detainees. However, it is unclear how helpful or significant the information they have gotten from detainees under interrogation. The reporter from the New Yorker brought up the situation of the detainees from
Egypt. He gave us false information about the link between Al Qaeda and Saddam. He had lied under the pressure of being interrogated. This makes me feel like there has to be a better way to extract information from the detainees. I am not quite sure how, but the information we have gotten so far cannot be a justification until we know that it is true.