American Theresienstadt

Interrogations Faked at Guantanamo, Witness Says on Yahoo! News

Authorities at Guantanamo Bay staged interrogations of detainees for visiting politicians and generals to give the impression that valuable intelligence was regularly being gathered, according to a former Army translator at the camp.

Former Army Sgt. Erik Saar told CBS television show 60 Minutes that he believes "only a few dozen" of the 600 detainees at the camp were terrorists and that little information was obtained from them.

"Interrogations were set up so the VIPs could come and witness an interrogation ... a mock interrogation, basically," Saar told the program, to air on Sunday.

"They would find a detainee that they knew to have been cooperative. They would ask the interrogator to go back over the same information," he said, calling it "a fictitious world" created for the visitors.

I know, I know. Conservatives accuse us of hysteria when we draw parallels between our actions in the War on Terrah with Nazi Germany. But this one is just so friggin' obvious. Theresienstadt was the fake camp the Nazis used to fool the Red Cross into believng there was no Holocaust. The differences between their actions and ours are getting ever finer.

The really scary part? Read this bit about the "good Germans."

I will have trouble sleeping tonight.

4/29 update: I stand corrected. Theresienstadt was a real camp -- relatives of mine died there, it turns out. But it was dressed up to fool the Red Cross, so the parallels are even stronger.