Gitmo: Why it's About More Than Merely Closing the Name

An ACLU alert arrived in my mailbox the other day asking me to do what I could to demand that Gitmo be closed. But just closing Gitmo accomplishes nothing if there are eight or 80 more places just like it operating around the world. All we do is move prisoners from one to another without ever addressing the problem Gitmo represents and how can one address it if the government is busy pretending there is no problem.

The VP came out this week - part of the venomous campaign against anyone who questions what we do there - and said Gitmo must continue because it safeguards us against "the worst of the worst" who he says are the people kept there.

But evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Gitmo has been in operation full time for "terrorists" since 2002. Of the many hundreds being kept there now and the hundreds among hundreds of others who have come and gone from Gitmo already, we've charged all of 5 people, none of whom have gone to trial yet, even those dreadful secret military trials where we will have one of the worst kinds of kangaroo courts working, worse even then those in other countries we like to point at and say, "This country is a terrorist because they do things like this."

Think of it - 5 of maybe five thousand individuals who've been sent to Gitmo. The rest we've let go. Why would we have let them go? Well, considering we've decided we can send them to Gitmo and keep them there "in perpetuity" without any explanation, without counsel, without charges brought, without due process, one has to assume all those folks - many of them UNDER age 18 according to the Brits - had little if any intelligence to share and were not found to represent any kind of danger to anyone.

Worst of the worst? Doesn't seem like it.

Consider the percentage rate of 5 in 5,000. So one in every 1,000 human beings we catch, hold secretly, submit to days, weeks, months, and even years of confinement, grilling, extreme conditions, and yes, canned peaches, and perhaps torture are worthy of having charges brought against them. Either we're catching ALL the wrong people or - more likely - we're really indiscriminate in whom we call "the worst of the worst". So we're committing a serious injustice to 999 people to get that one we charge - and consider that NO Gitmo imprisoned people have EVER gone to trial.

So while I have no problem with ending Gitmo, which seems to have an incredibly bad track record if they really ARE trying to imprison the "worst of the worst" with just 1 person charged in every 1,000 held there, we'll just have another place like Gitmo operating in Uzbekistan or some other third world country or heck, Kansas or Oklahoma.

This government has a vested interest in keeping everything so secretive because if it were not, you might be asking pesky questions like, "So what are we accomplishing?" They need to keep you scared to keep things so hush-hush, so they have to keep telling you what a great job they're doing scaring and beating the crap out of Muslims and others and Gitmo is one of the great successes they point to. If Gitmo is a success, God help us.

But we won't cure a thing with closing Gitmo because a) the rest of the world knows what we did and hates us for it and b) we'll still be doing it elsewhere.

Consider one other major issue: if the president lied about Iraq, did he orchestrate a much bigger lie to pull together the War on Terror? And if so, what does that mean about 9/11, the attack that seems to have only been possible on Mr.Bush's watch where 232 separate safeguards ALL had to fail on that day for the devastation to have been as successful as it was.

So don't get distracted with the question of just Gitmo. We have to have a systematic change that doesn't allow a place like Gitmo so we can't recreate it elsewhere in order to get anywhere. And the crew in office now has far too vested an interest in denying there is a problem and in keeping the inefficiency and fear going so defense contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel can flourish.