Alexander says we’re as bad as the Khmer Rouge

Our favorite Air Force interrogator, Matthew Alexander, is writing at Vote Vets again. This time he says he’s been to a Khmer Rouge prison in Cambodia – and of course it reminds him of Guantanamo and the way we treated the folks we detained there.

It is estimated that nearly 3 million people were executed during the Khmer Rouge’s purge of Cambodian society. It’s hard not to walk through the Tuol Sleng prison and read about the atrocities and not think about the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Although Gitmo has never come close to the scale and depth of what happened at Tuol Sleng, there are disturbing similarities.

One of those “disturbing similarities”;

The entire operation at Tuol Sleng was tightly controlled by the Khmer Rouge high command (they eventually even executed the torturers, cycling in new ones, fearing that they were contaminated by their proximity to the prisoners). Duch, the infamous Tuol Sleng warden who is currently on trial in Cambodia for crimes against humanity, took his orders directly from Pol Pot.

Yeah, I remember Cheney ordering the guards at Gitmo murdered. Don’t you? Another “similarity”;

The second thing that strikes you about Tuol Sleng is that many of its victims were children. Judging from the photos of the victims on display, some of them couldn’t have been older than five. The Khmer Rouge exterminated offspring of opposition members like pests. They were concerned that subversive tendencies would be inherited. At the Guantanamo Bay prison, the U.S. continues to hold minors under the age of eighteen. It is a barbaric practice.

Yeah, there’s no difference between 5 years old and eighteen. And if I’m not mistaken, there are no more eighteen-year-olds at Guantanamo. Matthews’ experience as an interrogator lasted four months, according to his records and the extent of his experience was as a team leader who conducted few, if any, of the actual interviews. Matthews never went to Guantanamo – all of his stories are secondhand rumors, but that doesn’t stop him from using those stories in his book, or on Vote Vets for that matter;

There is a sign depicting the rules for prisoners, called the Security Regulations, and rule number six reads: “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.” That reminded me of the infamous sign at the Baghdad airport prison, allegedly used by Special Forces, which read, “No Blood, No Foul.”

(Emphasis mine) Allegedly? Really? That’s a faithful telling of the tale?

I guess it’s no wonder that at the AFOSI convention a few weeks back, when his fellow OSIs found out who Matthew Alexander really was and that this particular major was working for George Soros and the ACLU, he was a bit of an outcast. I wonder who put the word out about him.

Category: Antiwar crowd, Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Terror War, Usual Suspects