In 2006 three murders were committed by unknown US government employees at Guantanamo Bay. As you’d expect the incident was covered up, with the deaths being played off as a group suicide. All this came to light in a genuine bombshell, 100% must read article by Scott Horton in next month’s Harper’s (it went online Monday). The serious and well document charges contained therein have already met with the usual formulaic and easily falsified denials.
If we had a national political dialogue that was even vaguely honest or sane this story would be front page news. Not only because it’s a terrible and public breach of what we like to think of as our national character, but because it involves the most fundamental aspects of “terrorism” and “national security”, supposedly two of the gravest issues of our time. Guantanamo, like it or not, is probably the most famous prison camp in the world and it is regarded with outright horror just about everywhere but here. All by itself it is a potent symbol of the United States as precisely the evil caricature propagated by extremist groups.
Closing that prison would do more to enhance the security of American citizens than almost any other single action. (Well, closing it and atoning for it would do more, but we can only expect so much in our domestic political environment.) And yet that eminently sane course of action has been repeatedly delayed and postponed for reasons that can be charitably described as “irrelevant” and accurately described as “fucking stupid”.
Read the Horton article, read it in its grisly entirety. And before you return to the regular parts of your day, commit this to memory: the US government murdered three foreign nationals who were almost certainly completely innocent of any wrongdoing. It did not happen accidentally with a bomb or a missile, but up close and personal. Remember this fact the next time someone tells you about the dangerousness of the Guantanamo prisoners, or the violent nature of Islam, or the inherent righteousness of our anti-terrorism policies.
Yes these murders happened under Bush the Younger, but many of the policies that led to them are being continued by his successor for political reasons. The only way fatal stupidities like these will stop is when that political rationale goes away. And that will only happen when our counter-terrorism policies are publicly understood to be massively counter productive. Do your part to protect America, remember the murdered and spread the word any way you can.
