Day: June 17, 2008

One of the excuses the present Administration uses for remaining an occupying power is to fight the terrorists in the Middle East so that they don’t have to fight them on American soil.  What is not said is the way we are waging this “war” insures we will create terrorists where there were none.

………….. U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Why is there still a Guantanamo Bay?

………top Bush administration officials knew within months of opening the Guantanamo detention center that many of the prisoners there weren’t “the worst of the worst.” From the moment that Guantanamo opened in early 2002, former Secretary of the Army Thomas White said, it was obvious that at least a third of the population didn’t belong there.

………..most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren’t terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

I can think of no reason other than precedent.  The US government wanted to see just how far it could go in detaining people, US citizens and others, without any recourse to the judicial system in order to say at some point in the future this was allowed and accepted by the other branches of government as well as the American people.  Thankfully, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees must have access to the court system so that precedent has been halted, somewhat. What has happened with American foreign policy is it has created enemies where there once were none, through the occupation of Iraq and the setting up of a puppet government that is now at odds with its citizens.  Rendering foreigners  from all over the world who have no intelligence value,  torturing them and eventually letting them go as the McClatchey study reveals is one way to guarantee distrust and dislike for American foreign policy and the people who are seen as carrying it out.

Watch it!