Friday’s “worst person in the world” — Rear Admiral Mark Buzby (with a little Beavis and Butt-Head humor at the end):
But our winner, Rear Admiral Mark Busby, [sic] the commander of the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. In a conference call with those who write about defense matters, he told blogger Andrew Lubin (ph), quote, “we don‘t have any solitary confinement down here at Guantanamo. What we have is single cells. There‘s one person to a cell. All the cells are all right next to each other.”
Lubin replied, “that‘s like having a single apartment in a fraternity house.” To which Rear Admiral Busby said, “pretty much.”
Imprisonment without trial, without access to an attorney, often on specious charges of terrorism, and, of course, that was the plot to “Animal House,” wasn‘t it?
Rear Admiral Mark Busby—that‘s Rear Admiral Mark Busby, today‘s Worst Person in the World!
Classy. Here’s the actual exchange from the DOD transcript to put the statement in context:
Q Sir, if you take — when I — again, I was down for the Hamdan
hearing, the defense attorneys for Hamdan, the people out of Perkins Coie were saying that after he won in — at the Supreme Court, he was put back in solitary confinement for punitive reasons. Could you address that?
ADM. BUZBY: Sure. We don’t have any solitary confinement down here in
Guantanamo. So that’s pretty easy.
Q Okay.
ADM. BUZBY: What we have is single cells. I mean, there’s one person
to a cell. All the cells are all right next to each other. So I guess — I
suppose it’s what you call solitary confinement. We — you know, it’s the same
sort of confinement — solitary, to me, is when you’re separated totally from
the whole population in a cell, and that’s it. And we don’t have that here.
Everyone is in their own cell, but they are all together in a group. So –
Q That’s like having a single apartment in a fraternity house.
ADM. BUZBY: Pretty much. Single room.
Q So he can knock on the walls, talk to people next door,
basically. I mean, they –
ADM. BUZBY: He can talk all day long, and they do. They talk
between cells, they talk between tiers, they talk between camps. It’s not quiet
over there, let me tell you.
Q Far different than what I’d understood, so that’s good to hear.
ADM. BUZBY: Absolutely.