Gee, Thanks For Clearing That Up

According to the Wall Street Journal, journalists at the New York Times have discovered that, contrary to being innocents unjustly detained by fascist George Bush, many of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are actually, you know, guilty as hell:

According to the six-year narrative of the press and political class, the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies fall somewhere between the Spanish Inquisition and the Ministry of Love in "1984." So it was something of a shock to read a remarkable front-page story in the New York Times yesterday, the abridged version being: Never mind.

In their 1,600-word dispatch "Next President Will Face Test on Detainees," reporters William Glaberson and Margot Williams discover that, gee whiz, many of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay really are dangerous terrorists. The Times reviewed "thousands of pages" of evidence that the government has so far made public and concludes that perhaps the reality is more complicated than the critics claim.

Lo and behold, detainees are implicated in such terror attacks as the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Those with "serious terrorism credentials" include al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and the so-called "Dirty 30," Osama bin Laden's cadre of bodyguards. The Times didn't mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, though he's awaiting a war-crimes tribunal at Gitmo too.

It has been joked that the NY Times should change its slogan from "All The News That's Fit To Print" to "All The News That Fits Our Agenda". Perhaps a better one would be "We'll Get Around To Practicing Journalism And Reporting The Truth......Eventually"