Guantanamo Chief To Become NATO Top Commander

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For a job well done?:

Gen. Bantz Craddock, the chief of U.S. Southern Command who oversees the controversial Guantanamo prison, is to succeed Gen. James Jones as NATO’s top commander of operations, the alliance said on Friday.

Craddock will succeed Jones as Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) at a date yet to be determined, NATO said in a statement released in Brussels.

Comments

  1. sarabeth says:
    July 14, 2006 at 10:15 am

    Just to clarify, I took the headline (without thinking) from the Reuters story I linked.

    Craddock does not run Guantanamo, he only oversees it.

    The runner would be Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris, of “I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us” fame.

  2. matt says:
    July 14, 2006 at 12:48 pm

    Reuters should be ashamed of themselves for that headline. I made the same mistake. SouthCom is a large command that Guantanamo is only a very small part of.

  3. sarabeth says:
    July 14, 2006 at 2:22 pm

    Reuters wasn’t the only culprit. The BBC went with the headline “Guantanamo general to head Nato”

  4. sarabeth says:
    July 17, 2006 at 5:29 pm

    In the immortal words of Dear Leader: “Shit!”

    Seems that I have a little egg on my face, and Reuters is going: “Who’s your Daddy now?”

    Although it remains true that Craddock was the overseer for Guantanamo, it wasn’t right to say he was only the overseer. It seems he was one enthusiastically cheerleading overseer.

    From Amanda at thinkprogress:

    While overseeing Guantanamo, Craddock has fiercly defended the prison’s interrogation practices and has been criticized for failing to take action against the abuses there. Some highlights:

    Craddock falsely insisted that a “significant number” of detainees at Guantanamo Bay were members of al-Qaeda. In Mar. 2005, Craddock said that a significant number of Guantanamo detainees “are highly trained, dangerous members of al-Qaida, its related terrorist networks, and the former Taliban regime.” In reality, only around eight percent of the detainees fought for al Qaeda and 16 percent for the Taliban.

    Craddock refused to reprimand Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller for abuse and torture of detainee Mohammad al-Qahtan. Miller, who “commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and later helped set up U.S. operations at Abu Ghraib, was accused of failing to properly supervise Qahtani’s interrogation plan and was recommended for reprimand by investigators.” Craddock refused to follow the investigators’ recommendation, justifying his decision by saying the interrogation “led to breaking al-Qahtani’s resistance and to solid intelligence gains.”

    Craddock joked about the detainee hunger strike, saying the prisoners had “choices” in feeding tube color, flavor of lozenges. In Feb. 2006, Craddock “joked that at least hunger strikers got to choose the color of their feeding tube (yellow was a favorite), and the flavor of the lozenges used to soothe thoats irritated by the feeding tubes. ‘Look, they get choices,’ Craddock said at the time. ‘And that’s part of the problem.’”