Have You Read The Manual?

A few days ago, an old manual for Guantanamo Bay was released. I say “released”. Leaked, really. It should have been released, of course, but then it should have said that the Red Cross were allowed to talk to all the ‘detainees’ (which is a polite word for “prisoners”) so you can see why it wasn’t. None of the news reports I saw actually included a link to the document itself, which to me seems like it would be a pretty important thing to include (hence I did post a link, and if you can’t find it then a Google search for “gitmo-sop.pdf” will find a list of mirrors).

It is, like all government documents, crushingly dull, but this one is livened up by the occasional patches of things-the-US-government-had-specifically-denied, and human rights violations. Of course, the US government have said that the document is out of date (it’s from 2003) and that now everyone gets access to the Red Cross, but then they said that in 2002 as well so they probably aren’t to be trusted.

But the thing that really baffled me was the full page illustration, with instructions, on how to correctly perform a Muslim burial. So your human rights are seen as unimportant when you’re alive but your religious convictions (which one way or another are probably why you’re in there to begin with) are respected even when you’re dead.

Who decided on those priorities?