At first it was hailed as a victory for civil liberties. But last week's announcement that warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency has come to an end means less than it first appears.
"Shocking" is what he said. But it was the baldness of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson's statement, not what he described, that proved shocking.
The first twenty prisoners arrived in hoods and shackles. American officials placed them in cages, surrounded by barbed wire, at Camp X-Ray at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay. That was five years ago. More than 700 people have been detained at Guantánamo since.
These are not auspicious days for defense secretaries new and old. Incoming Pentagon boss Robert Gates must negotiate the gap between the Iraq Study Group's position and his boss's obdurate refusal to see the implausibility of current strategy for that war. While Iraq must loom large on the Pentagon's agenda for the foreseeable future, there is much more unfinished business from the era of Donald Rumsfeld.
The system of transferring prisoners seized in the “war on terror” between secret locations around the world involves a new form of transnational injustice. Civil society must catch up.
