Guantanamo: A Legacy Of Shame

It will take the United States many years to live down the atrocity known as Gitmo - Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility. It was bad enough that the Bush administration was lying to everyone about the torture going on there. Torture was commonplace. The Bush administration says what they did at Guantanamo garnered them valuable information about terrorism. However, CIA analysts who had to evaluate the information said it was worthless.

Of course, most information gathered by torture is worthless. A man being tortured is far more interested in telling you what you want to hear than in telling the truth. That's because when you hear what you want to hear the torture will stop, whereas the truth might only invite further torture.

But now we learn via an investigation by McClatchy News that there is another reason the information was worthless. Hundreds of the detainees were either very low-level Taliban foot-soldiers, or they were not connected to terrorism at all. In other words, they had no information to give.

They were reported to police or American soldiers as terrorists, because of old fueds and disputes or simply to get some reward money. Very soon after the U.S. entered Afghanistan, it was learned that the U.S. would pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for anyone with terrorist ties, and did little or no checking to verify the truth of accusations. If you didn't like someone, just tell the authorities he was a terrorist. They would arrest him and pay you a big bounty -- whether it was true or not.

The sad thing is that the Bush administration knew this was happening. But they were so paranoid about letting a real terrorist slip through their hands, that they imprisoned over 770 at Guantanamo anyway. Of that 770, only six have ever been charged with a crime. Hundreds of others have been finally released after years of incarceration and torture.

There are still nearly 300 detainees at Gitmo. One is left to wonder, why have only six been charged if all of them pose a danger to the United States. Obviously, no evidence exists of this "danger", except in the depraved minds of members of the Bush administration. If any evidence existed, charges would have been filed.

Now it becomes clear why the Bush administration wanted to deny even the most basic legal rights to the detainees. They had absolutely no evidence on which to hold them, but were afraid if they released them that one or two might actually turn out later to have been a terrorist. It simply did not matter to them that hundreds of innocents were being imprisoned and tortured.

Bush seems to think that history will vindicate him in the long-run. I think just the opposite will happen. I think as more and more of the truth comes out, future generations will revile him and wonder how our generation could have allowed him to do such terrible things. In fact, I wonder that myself.

This generation tried to impeach one president for getting a "blow-job" in the White House, but let another get away with starting an unnecessary war that killed thousand of innocents and tortured and imprisoned many others.

I was going to ask where are our values, but I think a better question may be -- do we have any values other than fear and greed?