Guantanamo

The New York Times > Opinion >NYT op-ed on Guantanamo:

The Bush administration has turned Guantánamo into a place that is devoid of due process and the rule of law. It’s a place where human beings can be imprisoned for life without being charged or tried, without ever seeing a lawyer, and without having their cases reviewed by a court. Congress and the courts should be uprooting this evil practice, but freedom and justice in the United States are on a post-9/11 downhill slide.

So we are stuck for the time being with the disgrace of Guantánamo, which will forever be a stain on the history of the United States, like the internment of the Japanese in World War II.

The story is worth reading because the case discussed shows not only how unjust and evil the government-sponsored torture going on in Guantanamo is, but how useless it is even for its stated purpose.

By means of months and years of detainment, our government was able to force a man to confess to being a part of Al Qaeda and being in an Osama video. Yay us, right? But he wasn’t. British intelligence has since proved that he was nowhere near Afghanistan at the time. He was in England. There is zero evidence that he ever had anything to do with Al Qaeda other than his own confessions under torture — which have been shown to be false.

That’s the thing with these brutal, inhuman interrogation techniques — they force people to tell you what you want to hear whether it’s true or not. Will that help us win the so-called “war on terror”?

Listen up, Republicans — we Democrats can’t do anything about this. Our party has next to no power in America anymore, and if we try to change these things it will be perceived as an attack on the Republicans, and will force the party in power to ever more strongly defend these practices. We need Republicans to repudiate these things and stop them — not deny and minimize them and finally blame them on underlings when they’re exposed by others — we need the Gonzaleses and Bushes and Rumsfelds of the world to change these things themselves. They’re the ones with the power to do so, and they need to be pressed to do so by the people who support them, not by the people who are trying to bring them down.

Come on, Republicans. We need you guys. Come through for us. Write your Congressmen and Senators. Write Bush, write Rumsfeld, write Gonzales. Don’t let this stuff go on in our name, in your name. It’s not helping us win the “war on terror” and even if it was it would be too great a cost.