GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In a stark rebuke of the torture carried out by the C.I.A. after the Sept. 11 attacks, seven senior military officers who heard graphic descriptions last week of the brutal treatment of a terrorist while in the agency’s custody wrote a letter calling it “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”
Well, it’s about fucking time. The last twenty years have been quite an embarrassment to be an American in so many different ways. Not to mention all the people we’ve killed, maimed, ruined, disillusioned, and disappointed. I wonder if we can extricate ourselves from the tremendously deep hole we have dug for ourselves. Or will we just shrug this little epiphany off?
Perhaps we could start with a whirlwind tour of Europe for Mr. Bush and Mr. Yoo. And how about a nice and toasty auto-da-fe for Mr. Trump and his cronies?
More likely, America will be murdered by the hand of the inevitable.
Some people wrote a letter. And that’s good. And it turns out yet again that the liberals were right all along and that imprisoning people without charge and torturing them is a bad thing.
But wake me up when we actually do something about Guantanamo.
There are 39 prisoners left or “Detainees”. So I would say something has been done. This is down from a height around 800. The Biden administration is in the process of trying to finally close this stupidity.
So while it is still F’d Up, I would say plenty has been done.
Biden can’t do much at all. Obama tried to shut it down on an annual basis and was stymied by members of Congress (both parties) who knew it would be political poison to allow the prisoners to be transferred to prisons in their states.
The detainees cannot be “transferred to prisons in their states”; none of them have been tried in the federal court system as defendants under US law with all of the protections and oversights it offers such as access to legal representation, ability to review evidence against them, right of appeal, et cetera. They have been tried by military tribunals as “enemy combatants”, often with limited or no legal representation, redacted evidence lists, and often without even a clear statement of charges. Should they be brought into the United States under the federal court system the extended pre-trial detention and conditions under which they were held would likely be grounds for dismissal, as would confessions obtained under duress (whether you want to call it “enhanced interrogation” or old fashioned torture), notwithstanding that for many detainees there likely is not enough admissible evidence to try them.
That many of the detainees were actual combatants (although others were known to be misidentified persons not responsible for any attacks against US servicepeople or otherwise involved in terrorist activities) makes it politically untenable to release them, and in some cases they have nowhere to go as their home nations won’t accept them, which leaves the question of what to do with them, which was an issue that Rumsfeld et al didn’t bother to consider before embarking on an ill-advised effort to extralegally abduct, transfer, and torture people to fight “The War on Terror”.
There is plenty of blame for Gitmo on both sides of the aisle. Democrats could have put some early brakes on this but didn’t for fear of looking “weak on terror”, and not the problem is so entrenched practically nobody wants to touch it even if they acknowledged that it is an absolute moral wrong and abeyance of all principles of law. The people still in Guantanamo Bay will probably be there until they die. But then, putting people in prison on flimsy pretences is what the United States (#1 in incarcerated people per capita) is good at, so this is just some of that globalism in the penal market. We can’t let Turkey and Mtaylasia have all the fun!
A lot of detainees were just “people that the local politicians didn’t like so they turned them over to America in return for a bounty equivalent to a year’s earnings, no questions asked”. Only a small number were actually any sort of threat.