Reply #10: complete idiocy and embarrassment

[Lexingtonian]

You have to think of the Guantanamo 'system' of prisons as the prisons that held captured Indians during the wars against them. It is/was utterly useless (much like Homeland Sec, for similar reason) but it appeases common folk Americans. You know, all those drips driving around rural America who need to imagine that 'Bush is keeping us safe' to justify their own political selfmutilation.

It's clear that very few- almost none- of the people being held were meaningfully terrorists, if any, and most of them are just people the regimes and warlords and such didn't like, or were just caught in some police or military dragnet and no one wanted- in this climate of fear, incompetence, insecurity, and retaliation that pervades the whole antiterrorist effort- to be the person to judge them innocent.

But after all this crappy detention, interrogations, and torture the Pentagon is too scared of them retaliating (lawsuits, actual terroristic attacks) to do anything with them. Essentially, the idea is have most of them die (read: drive them to suicide) or hand them over to foreign governments who will lock them up for life.

It's morally bankrupt idiocy and embarrassment. An honest accounting and atonement means a Bush apology, massive class action lawsuits and financial compensation (in the billions), revoking the PATRIOT Act for the most part, admission of the "detainees"' civil rights in the American legal system under the 14th Amendment, jailing of the American perpetrators of torture (probably hundreds of people, many CIA and such), firing Rumsfeld and a pile of Pentagon brass, shutdown of the Guantanamo system, and an enormous international political victory for Al Qaeda.

It's a disaster for the American Right. I never imagined they'd get themselves in this deep and surprised at how far they have given that they know the whole thing will be exposed at some point. But reactionaries are strange that way.