The Government Responds

Secret Camp Photo

In Iran, when prisoners are turned into corpses after interrogation, even the Khamenei junta feels it necessary to respond. In America, not so much. But we do have one response from Colonel Bumgarner, the official who allegedly concocted the self-hanging, self-throat-stuffing suicide narrative that is now in question:

I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is ...

As Scott Horton notes,

As we confirmed with Defense Department records, Bumgarner recommended Hickman for a medal (shown below) based on his cool-headed approach to defusing a prison riot on May 18, 2006. Moreover, Hickman was selected as NCO of the Quarter at Guantánamo, a fact the camp commander would certainly have known at the time.

Bumgarner also claims that Hickman

knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

Really? That was not Bumgarner's sworn testimony to the NCIS:

“On the night of 09JUN06, I was not in the camp. I had spent the evening at Admiral Harris’s house.” (This can be found on pp. 1059-60 of the NCIS evidence file, and can be examined here [PDF, 1.1M] on page 6 of the original document.) This account matches the recollection of other witnesses cited in Admiral Harris’s AR 15-6 statement, especially the statements beginning at p. 118. In all these accounts, Colonel Bumgarner does not arrive at the camp until 12:48 a.m. on the morning of June 10. The operative events of the narrative furnished by the guards occurred between 7:00 p.m. and midnightlong before Bumgarner’s arrival on the scene.

The Obama Justice Department refuses to answer these credible claims of cover-up of murder. The Justice Department:

"The Department took this matter very seriously. A number of Department attorneys and agents extensively and thoroughly reviewed the allegations and found no evidence of wrongdoing."

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan