freedetainees.org

Most Americans have had their fill of hearing awful truths about their government. But that doesn’t mean we get to ignore the facts. Among those things we may be sick of hearing about is our detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The way our government has treated detainees since we embarked on this “war on terror” constitutes nothing short of creating its own form of terrorism and unleashing it upon an entire population.

The latest Amnesty International report slams the U.S. (among other countries) for failing to uphold human rights standards. “With breathtaking legal obfuscation, the U.S. administration has continued its efforts to weaken the absolute prohibition against torture and other ill treatment,” reads the report. “The U.S. president authorized the CIA to continue secret detention and interrogation, although they amount to the international crime of enforced disappearance. Hundreds of prisoners in Guantanamo and Bagram, and thousands in Iraq, continued to be detained without charge or trial, many for more than six years.” Guantanamo cells are so grim that the group is taking a replica of one on a show-and-tell tour, torturers not included, to show us what our tax dollars are paying for.

This country’s credibility is horribly, possibly irreparably, damaged.

Our standards for our own conduct are alarmingly low. Simply condemning the report, as the U.S. has done (China did the same, so we’re in great company), hardly addresses the question: When are we going to close the prison we never should have opened in the first place?