Why do political beings rush to spotlight reports of confirming information but smother those that fail to produce the smoking gun they made much of when parading their intention to get to the bottom of alleged improprieties? Perhaps an answer lurks not so much in the Memorial Day weekend release of the Guantanamo Review commissioned by a January 2009 presidential order. (See http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/pdf/GTMOtaskforcereport_052810.pdf?sid=ST2010052803890) Instead, the telltale insights come from the handling of the report.
Item 1: The report, completed in January 2010, was just released in May 2010, on a holiday weekend, on a Friday. None of the fanfare surrounding the announcement of the intention to get to the bottom of the Guantanamo situation and its implied, dire consequences for human rights accompanied the commissioned findings.
Item 2: Despite making the case that 95% of Guantanamo detainees are terrorists adversaries of the United States and, at most, 5% may be difficult to categorize in such a fashion, the administration's takeaway from this report drew little attention to the danger that the Guantanamo detainees pose for America and Americans. Instead, they emphasized that most detainees were low-level fighters. (See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/31/AR2010053101702.html?nav=hcmoduletmv, where a Washington Post columnist observes how his own newspaper characterized the report in a Saturday news article following the report's release.)
Lessons?
1. One need not lie to deceive. Delay works.
2. Control the spotlight, and facts need not intrude into one's agenda. The desired impact apparently came from announcing the Guantanamo review, hence no sense of urgency in tracking its progress, reporting its conclusion a year later, or questioning why something important enough for a presidentially decreed task force took almost half a year to see the light of day.
3. Whatever such proceedings communicate to those who would kill us, it is hardly a message of strength or deterrence. Instead, it calls to mind these words of Hilaire Belloc:
We sit by and watch the barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh, we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces, there is no smile.
-- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.