Dear Editor:
(Re: "Keeping Guantanamo Bay and ideals of morality open," Greg Collins, Editorial, Nov 18)
In his Tuesday column, Greg Collins calls on President-Elect Obama to announce that "America already has, and continues to, display the moral high ground during the war on terror." The columnist, after an excruciatingly contrived defense of Guantanamo, is asking our future President to lie. We ceded the moral high ground years ago. It is the task of the new president to ensure that we get it back.
Collins' point is that morality must be trumped by military necessity. To the columnist, Guantanamo is a necessary evil, maintained by military officers whose responsibility it is to protect us from "enemies who are intent on blowing up and killing as many Americans as possible." He mocks the "professors and human rights activists" who in their disgust with Guantanamo have clearly forgotten 9/11.
Let's just get this 'military necessity' question out of the way. In June of 2004, The New York Times reported that of the nearly 600 detainees in Guantanamo not more than two dozen were closely linked to al-Qaeda and that only a very limited amount of information could be gleaned from the questionings.
Why? Simple: When we invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many Afghanis turned in their neighbors in exchange for the enormous cash bounties we'd promised in leaflets dropped during the bombings.
These innocents made up the bulk of those first sent to Guantanamo from Afghanistan in 2002. Deemed 'enemy combatants,' and therefore not subject to U.S. laws or the Geneva Convention, many of these men have been held without charges ever since. We stole years from the lives of innocents with no explanation. Even if we hadn't caused them to suffer terribly, this would be a scandal.
Let me put this plainly: We torture our prisoners. Despite the Bush Administration evilly raising the bar for what can be legally called torture to 'actions that can cause death or major organ failure,' we have been torturing Guantanamo detainees for years.
The worst offenses - waterboarding, stress positions, extreme temperatures, and nasal force-feeding - are so clearly torture that there is a near-unanimous international condemnation of these practices.
Collins pretends that torture is some malleable concept that deserves debate. Really, this is a far less controversial issue than it seems. Torture is wrong, but we do it. We have gleaned little or no actionable information from this torture.
Torture at Guantanamo (and Abu Ghraib, and the military prison at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, and at countless other lawless 'black sites') has not made us safer, in fact, just the opposite. By shirking the Geneva Convention, we have given our enemies more reason to hate us and less reason to treat decently any American soldier they might capture.
In 2006, Colin Powell put it best when he said that "We have shaken the belief the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open … we don't need it and it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it."
If we ever hope to reclaim our moral stature, we must close Guantanamo.
Ben Throckmorton
UMass student
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