This post by Amy Ephron succinctly sums up a horrible situation:
There are so many things that are wrong with Guantanamo, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a complicated issue and it’s a bit like defending the wrong side. Unless you look at it from the human rights angle, as a 6th Amendment issue, not to mention the Geneva Convention… Or simply from the point of view of, “We’re going to lock you up forever, we’re never going to charge you with anything, no one in your family will ever know what happened to you, you’ll never any contact with the outside world again but we’re going to give you prozac, so, you won’t mind.”
Of course, you wouldn’t know of any problems from the official U.S. government website regarding Guantanamo. In that fine newspaper, this is the only hint of what’s really going on out at the “naval base”:
During the past year Naval Base Guantanamo Bay has become the host to the Detainee Mission of the War on Terrorism following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
[Emphasis added]. How much does anyone from the government care about what really goes on in Guantanamo and when? Not enough to even update the official Guantanamo website. Well, actually, that’s not accurate. The June 9, 2006 edition of the Guantanamo Bay Gazette reports a recent event: that several of the people who run Guantanamo voluntarily lost weight as part of a weight loss contest. Good for them!
Oh, yeah. And we’ve got several dead prisoners this week. Let’s see if those deaths show up in the next edition of the Guantanamo Bay Gazette.
Did you see how the Bushies spun the Gitmo suicides? They characterized them as an "attack" on the U.S.! Their argument was that the coordinated suicide pact made America look bad and was an effort to undermine Bush's "war on terrorism."
If the Bushies see suicide as a form of "attack," then perhaps we should hope that the Bushies soon go on the offensive themselves. 😉
Grumpy: There's no end to this madness. If this administration hasn't already said it, they'll soon be claiming that they'd be doing the detainees a favor to put them to death, given the bleakness of their alternative existence.
I'm not a big fan of Al-Caida. What concerns me about all of this is that we have NO IDEA how many of these detainees are totally innocent, grabbed by our military at the suggestion of someone who decided to make some quick reward money by accusing a random cab driver or laborer of being Al-Caida. Guantanamo has turned so very ugly that we can't even ask ourselves the obvious questions any more–which of these guys deserve to be there? We can't bear to ask that question because of the possibility that our actions toward SOME of the detainees, the ones that might be innocent, have been detestable.
Indeed, for a nation founded on the principle that people are innocent until proven guilty, it baffles me why more Americans aren't marching in the streets over Guantanamo. Even Nazi war criminals got trials, and they had slaughtered millions of innocent people in extermination FACTORIES. The only thing the "enemy combatants" in Gitmo did was shoot back when US troops invaded their country. The only justification the Bush Administration has given for the continued detention of the people at Gitmo is that "they want to kill Americans." Yes, well, if some foreign nationals invaded my country, killed my buddies, kidnapped me for shooting back at them, shipped me to a prison in a remote corner of the world, and held me there for years without any hope of ever getting a trial (much less a fair one), I'd probably be eager to kill my captors, too. When Jesus said, "love your enemy," I don't think he meant locking them up like animals.
Gitmos has been deplored by both Amnesty International and the International Red Cross, it violates international laws concerning war criminals and prisoners-of-war, it has virtually no legal support under the US Constitution, and if international terrorists need a reason to want to kill Americans, I'd say the hypocrisy of imprisoning innocent people at Gitmo certainly qualifies.
I sure would like to know what metric Bush uses to convince himself he is "winning" the war on terrorism, because it sure seems to me he is making an awful lot of people around the world hate us enough to want us dead. So what if Iraq ever becomes a stable democracy; what about the hundreds of thousands of people (both inside and outside of Iraq) who have friends or relatives that have been killed, maimed, tortured or humiliated by US troops? I sure do wonder how many budding terrorists Bush has created with his abusive methods, despite his lofty-sounding goal.