It’s the Torture, Not the Torture Location, Stupid!

Various American politicians and ex-politicians are not calling for the closing of the American detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Superficially, it sounds like a good idea.

But would it mean the end of torture of prisoners by Americans or of extraordinary rendition to foreign prisons for torture by allied governments? Hardly! We already know that Bagram AFB in Afghanistan is a torture center, as is Abu Ghraib. How do we know that they knew, friendly alliance between the U.S. and the Government of Sudan is not resulting in the installation of detention/torture facilities in that distant land? How do we know that military facilities in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan are not being used for torture? Even U.S. Naval ships at sea have been reported as detention centers, which lead to a logical assumption that torture is carried out in the bowels of aircraft carriers and other ships.

No, the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay may not mean the end of torture at all. In fact, it may be much more cost effective to leave the detentions and the interrogations in theater and thus avoid the transport costs of shipping prisoners by aircraft halfway around the world by the hundreds, and perhaps even by the thousands.

Closing Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, or other individual facilities means little or nothing. What counts is a change of attitude, a change of policy, a change of morality, which will likely only occur with a change of government in the United States of America. Impeachment could be the fulcrum on which the change of American government would hinge. Impeachment, then incarceration, then interrogation of the whole Bush junta would be the actions that could begin a healing process for all the victims of torture in the bogus War on Terror.