Guantánamo

By Capt Fogg

O dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! total eclipse, Without all hope of day.
-John Milton, Sampson Agonistes-

The worst of the worst, scum de la scum; they're bad, evil, terrible people we are holding in Guantánamo, or so we have been told all along. Don't feel bad for the men in cages, we're only torturing them a little bit and after all, if someone has information about a terrible terrorist plot, wouldn't you torture them to find out?

Try to reconcile that official rationale for dehumanizing a group of people picked up or kidnapped under widely varying circumstances from many different places and sometimes only because somebody accused them, or they had a name similar to somebody who might have known somebody; try to reconcile it with the steady trickle of prisoners who after 5 years of duress and investigation have been released as not being dangerous or knowing nothing and being not guilty of doing anything.

Isa Murbati, a 41-year-old father of five who had been a Guantánamo prisoner for more than five years without having been charged with anything, arrived in Bahrain last night. Oops, never mind. He's the sixth and last Bahraini to be released and all the men had been in coveralls and cages since 2002. At lease one had attempted suicide repeatedly. If it had not been for the persistent efforts of the government of Bahrain and King Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa, whose kingdom is considered to be "pro-American" and allows the US to base the Fifth Fleet there, who knows what would have happened to these wretches? Many other prisoners have no place to go because no country will take them. No money, no clothes, no country and most assuredly nearly or fully demented from half a decade of no sleep and waterboarding. The worst of the worst.

The government of Bahrain will seek compensation and perhaps they will succeed. After all they do have leverage, but paying damages would be an admission of having done something wrong and admissions of wrong doing do not escape the iron curtain around the White House any more easily that light will exit any other black hole. I'm sure something will be worked out to save the smiling face of our delusional dictator, but what amount of money can restore a ruined life, a ruined mind?

As far as anyone knows, the amount of valuable information extracted from the torture rooms is about nil. Of course the black hole doesn't emit much light and what it does emit tends to be disinformation or denial, but what can a man who has been in a dog cage for 5 years tell us about? Not much about Osama perhaps, but he can tell us a lot about the United States of America.

Nothing short of impeachment can restore our ruined reputation and bring back the light to the dark and secret nightmare cellars of our nation.

(Cross-posted at Human Voices.)