GITMO: CLOSE IT, SEND PRISONERS TO BUSH RANCH!

GITMO, BUSH AND CHENEY CRIME, MAKE THEM PAY

A solution to the problem of prisoners at Gitmo just came to me as I listened to a disquieting review on NPR today of the present conditions at our USA Guantanamo Gulag. I thought, “Hey, wait, it was Bush and Cheney's big brain storm to set up Guantanamo”. (But sadly I must add here that Mr.Obama, is also culpable. He was elected specifically to right these wrongs, but has been sitting on his long and gracefully tapering fingers for four long years and not lifted one of his fine digits to alter this situation.) They (the Bush crowd) and their henchmen also decided to use torture to extract information from the detainees so that that any evidence obtained from them was ultimately inadmissible in any court in the world. They also had the great idea to gather information by doling out cash to tribal chieftains, and other locals to make sweeps across Iraq and Afghanistan to arrest “suspicious characters” who were then turned over to and interrogated by the CIA for information. Some were tortured. It is not hard to imagine how readily and likely corruption and malfeasance would occur under such circumstances, with the result that many innocent people were swept up for no good reason except the CIA cash. Bush and Cheney and their underlings made no provisions to ameliorate this problem and innocents were detained, tortured and imprisoned. Now after all these years, these men remain incarcerated, under the harshest conditions, but worse, they are imprisoned with no charges, no habeus corpus, no trials, some having no idea why they were arrested, and no idea when or if they will face their accusers, or be tried, convicted, or released---if ever. Their despair has led them to take part in a hunger strike.

All in all, it is Bush and Cheney who are the war criminals responsible for this fiasco, the war, the massive costs, the hundreds of thousands of deaths, and the pain and suffering of an entire nation as we now face the ugly problem of deciding what to do both legally and morally with these men, the vast majority of whom, have been deemed innocent of any crime, and who have been incarcerated now for a up to a decade. At present, the camp is faced with another problem---a massive prisoner hunger strike, which is being “handled” by the military by brutally force-feeding inmates. By all international standards, forced feeding is just another form of torture.

Like George Bush's unnecessary, counter-productive and expensive wars which will cost the nation three trillion dollars when all is said and done....his concept of incarcerating prisoners has been revealed to be unbelievably expensive too. It is common knowledge now that each prisoner (171 of them) costs the taxpayer annually nearly a million dollars (some estimate the cost more precisely as between $800,000 to $900,000). The average prisoner in a state-side penitentiary costs only 1/50 of that amount, or about $20,000 to incarcerate an individual for a year. Why the huge disparity? The hot climate and need for continuous air conditioning, is one, as well as the fact that because the prison camp was situated purposely in an isolated and secretive place on another nation's island, a nation with which we have no trade relations, so we can not staff the camp or supply it locally. The Bush team knew that the gulag they were organizing was going to function outside of our national laws, thus it had to be located outside of US legal jurisdiction. And perhaps considering what went on there, Bush and Cheney did not want anyone looking over the shoulder of the camp commander. However, that reasoning and decision was a costly one. To service the staff and prisoners in this isolated guglag far from the mainland, every bit of fuel, water, food and even toilet paper must be flown in or transported by ship. The costs are astronomical for a prison camp.

My thinking is this, since Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney generated the underlying causes and the specific circumstances of this mess, they should be held fiscally responsible. The majority did not vote for Bush (the first time), the majority of our citizenry would not have agreed to go to war in Iraq, were they not lied to. The majority certainly did not agree to torture or dream up the disaster of Gitmo. It was Cheney and Bush who were the creators and architects of this mess. Perhaps we should send the problem in the form of a line of shackled prisoners to their homes and ranches where the Cheneys and Bushes would host these men. In lieu of that, I suggest a tax on the Bush and Cheney's estates to help pay for the up-keep of these men on the island where THEY decided they should go. They could well afford it, profiting on the war they way they did. Gitmo is their mess and their shame. They should pay.

Perhaps if we saddle the perpetrators with the costs of their perfidy, future inhabitants of our White House (and Blair House) might be much more circumspect about leading a nation into unnecessary wars, torturing prisoners so we can not try them, leaving us with a bill of near two hundred million dollars a year with no end in sight, and staining the nation's honor with epithet of “torturer” and “human rights violator”.

Get the picture?

rjk