The Horrors of Our Time (IV): Beyond Evil

I will analyze this latest story and some of the reaction to it in further detail very soon. Please read the earlier parts of this series, which also concern the Guantanamo suicides:

Monsters in Our Midst -- "Dying Is Not Permitted"

Perfecting Denial -- and Blaming the Victim, Even After Death

Now comes this story, where the Bush administration continues to reveal its unspeakably loathsome nature:

Three suicides at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may have been part of a broader plot by detainees who were using confidential lawyer-client papers and envelopes to pass handwritten notes their guards could not intercept, according to documents that government lawyers filed yesterday in federal court.

Detainees could apparently hide documents in their cells -- including instructions on how to tie knots and a classified U.S. military memo regarding cell locations of detainees and camp operational matters at Guantanamo -- by keeping the materials in envelopes labeled as lawyer-client communications. Notes that investigators found after the suicides on June 10 were apparently written on the back of notepaper stamped "Attorney Client Privilege," which allowed detainees to communicate secretly without interference, according to government officials.

The alleged discoveries have led military commanders to suspend allowing detainees to have paper provided by defense lawyers.

...

Defense lawyers for Guantanamo detainees said that their clients are closely monitored and should have no way to pass such notes, and that the filing yesterday is designed to complicate their efforts.

...

Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents most of the Guantanamo detainees, said the allegations that lawyers could have played a role in the suicides are "patently offensive" and "outrageous." She said the government is again trying to make it difficult for lawyers to represent the 450 detainees held there.

"I can't imagine what they think they've found," Olshansky said last night. "All I can see this as is an elaborate ruse to take away whatever these people have so they have absolutely nothing, and to make these lawyers fight for yet another thing."

...

Defense lawyers have called the suicides acts of desperation by detainees who saw no hope of being released or of having a fair trial.

"The whole concept that these suicides are a plot or a plan is of a piece with the absurd contention that suicide is an act of warfare in this setting," said David Remes, a Washington lawyer who represents a group of Guantanamo detainees. "What comes through to me is that the military has found a way to use the suicides to break through a very carefully constructed and painstakingly negotiated mechanism of protecting the attorney-client privilege."

David Engelhardt, who represented Ali Abdullah Ahmed, a Yemeni detainee who killed himself June 10, said there is no way to know if there was a suicide plot because he was never granted access to his client.

"A plot to do what?" Engelhardt said. "Who exactly did he hurt by hanging himself? What do you have to gain besides the stretching of your own neck? This is offensive and ignorant."

About this, Michelle Malkin -- open, unapologetic racist, endless defiler of the most basic requirements of human decency and care for human life, and "respectable" mainstream commentator -- opens her post with this:

The manipulative detainees at Guantanamo Bay reportedly used the generous civil liberties protections we gave them to plot their suicide pact. Are you surprised?

"The manipulative detainees..."

"...the generous civil liberties protections we gave them..."

And Malkin then links to her earlier entry, "The Gitmo Suicide Stunt," with this line: "All together now: Boo Freakin Hoo." "Boo Freakin Hoo" is also part of the title of this monster's latest post.

I hereby announce that we need another concept, one that goes far beyond evil. I honestly don't know how to describe the pure, distilled, unadulterated malevolence that Malkin embodies.

The fact that a large segment of Americans views someone like this as "respectable" in even the slightest degree is a damnable mark on our nation, one that will take decades to erase.