US Crimes at Guantanamo

In twenty or thirty years, Americans will be aghast at the crimes of the Bush and Obama administrations. They have allowed innocent people to be imprisoned for years. Here is the latest one. This info was leaked via UK newspapers via a blog that monitors the press in the UK:

The Daily Telegraph has published 759 of the leaked Guantánamo files it obtained from WikiLeaks, despite the files not having been redacted to remove sensitive information.

One of the documents published by the Telegraph today includes the full name of a boy detained at Guantánamo who, according to the file, was raped at the age of 15, just prior to being transferred to the camp.

...

No charges were brought against the detainee, who was captured by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to Guantánamo Bay "because of his possible knowledge of Taliban resistance efforts and local leaders". He was released a little more than a year after being transferred to the camp.

Go read the original post to get the full article and the embedded links.

Like the vicious internment of innocent Japanese during WWII, this Guantanamo camp with so many innocent people swept up in Afghanistan and Pakistan forced to endure years of mistreatment by brutal American torture techniques and years of imprisonment with no charges, no evidence, and no guilt.

My personal concern is the vicious treatment of Omar Khadr, a child soldier pushed into al Qaeda by his fanatical father. The kid was 15 when captured. Under international law you can't treat children as "soldiers" but the US has ignored international law. It held him for 8 years before they finally wore him down to sign a "guilty" plea. For that, the US gave him a 16 year sentence. His crime? The US claims he threw a grenade that killed a US soldier, but that is really, really hard to prove. But even if he did, you don't put 15 year olds into prison for 16 years for that. And you certainly don't torture them for years and years. Oh wait... I need to qualify that. Civilized countries don't do that, but the US does and is doing it to Omar Khadr.

Guantanamo is a very black mark on America and it will only fester. Obama promised to close it in 2008 and have trials, but it is now two years later and still nothing! Twenty or thirty years from now Americans will have to hang their heads in shame for these crimes. To my mind it is a crime on the same scale at uprooting 110,000 innocent people, forcing them to sell their homes and businesses "for a song", and shipping them off to godawful desolate places to live behind wire, watched closely by soldiers with machine guns, and having their lives run by prison administration... for no crime!

There are a few guilty terrorists at Guantanamo, but they make up less than a third of the internees. The whole "secret prisons" and "extra legal" treatment of post-9/11 suspects is a horrible black mark on America.