Ride this ^ Not that =>.
...and nobody's getting a trip to Disneyland. (That's where we went on my eighth birthday.)
No such luck for the dozens of innocent men still stuck on a Caribbean island, deprived of their rights, their families, their homes and their health.
Today, on the eighth anniversary of Guantanamo opening as a black hole of a prison for people we're paranoid about, the still-detained prisoners can look forward to a nice round of torture, and it's not an E-ticket ride.
According to Andy Worthington 779 boys and men arrived during the eight years, and 198 remain. This is wrong.
Gitmo-the-prison does wrong in our names. Wrong legally, wrong ethically, wrong morally. It leaves a spiritual stain on our collective conscience.
It is beyond counter-productive. We are waterboarding ourselves in the foot there.
Worthington's exhaustive research showed 93% of those detained were proven innocent. That's 725 men, with 725 families, all stung by grievous harm and injustice.
...a prison in which the overwhelming majority of those held — at least 93 percent of the 779 men and boys imprisoned in total — were either completely innocent people, seized as a result of dubious intelligence or sold for bounty payments, or Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or international terrorism.
Stop it now. Stop it before another idealistic young man tries to do us grievous harm and injustice.
(Photo credits: Painting of Khmer Rouge waterboarding from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum; LIFE Magazine Disneyland photo)
