Taxi to the Dark Side

A few days ago, "anonymous" posted a comment to my blog entry about closing Guantanamo.

I responded to the comment with a comment. But having just finished watching Taxi to the Dark Side, I felt compelled to provide a few more reasons newly known to me about why we should close these detention camps--where incentives to turn people in as terrorists (even when they are not) are combined with the expectation to produce intelligence at any cost. Throw in the permissible use of harsh interrogation techniques (which, when combined, constitute torture) and a presidential self-pardon for war crimes, and what do you get?

Dead/destroyed innocent lives, ruined American soldiers who were set up to take the fall.

What else did I learn?

• Only 7% of detainees were picked up by U.S. or Allied Forces.
• 90% were picked up/turned in by Pakistanis or Afghan warlords in exchange for bounties and cash payments. As it turns out, the film's primary subject, an Afghan civilian who died in U.S. custody, his death declared by U.S. coroner to be a "homicide," was just an innocent taxi driver who was pulled over and turned in by an actual terrorist, who the U.S. learned later had been turning in innocent civilians to cover his own tracks. Add in Bush's elimination of habeus corpus, and you have a recipe for innocent civilians being incarcerated, subject to torture, and without knowledge of why they are being held and having no access to a trial.
• Oh yeah...and only 8% of detainees turn out to have any actual connections to Al Qaeda.
• Having lots of people in custody is an excellent pr stunt that gives the appearance that the U.S. is actually winning the war on terror. (Except we are really just creating reasons for more Arabs to mistrust, and in some cases, hate the U.S.)
  

So my dear anonymous, this is why we must close Guantanamo, and any other such prison where such atrocities and injustices are perpetuated. They are fundamentally un-American, and they are also against international law.

Bush may have pardoned himself and his people from U.S. law, but they should be tried by the international community and locked up. At some point, we all, individually, have to become the bigger person. So incarcerate, but you know...stop short of torturing them. Like I said, I'm working on becoming a bigger person. ;-)

War Crimes: America's Unfinished Business