The progressive movement has consistently been against torture. They (or we) will site that the techniques used are the same as the Spanish Inquisition and that the US has prosecuted others as committing war crimes for the same acts. And the main rebuttal has been to invoke 9/11 and accused of being soft on terror.
It has been considered legal up to this point because it is being done out side the states. This argument doesn't fly for me for two reasons. First John McCain was born in Panama, but because it was born on military base, he is considered a natural born citizen. So when babies are born on base it's America but if we torture there it isn't.
The second reason I don't accept that it's okay if it's in Cuba is that it sounds too much like the "rule" that if you have an affair in a different timezone it doesn't count as cheating.
Now there is a new problem. Bradley Manning is a US soldier accused of providing classified papers to Wikileaks and he is being in much the same way as terror suspects. This flies right in the face of the Constitution and it would have never happened if we didn't allow the military to get away with it before.
Manning has been imprisoned for months without trial. Most of it has been in solitary confinement and he has been forced to strip his clothes as a breaking technique.
I have a hard time believing that if the military had been reprimanded for the abuses at Gitmo that they would be trying the same kind of thing to this US citizen.
Some reading this article may not have a problem with this because of what Manning allegedly did. But let us not forget that several of the people held in Guantanamo Bay were actually innocent. That is the reason we have a court system is to confirm guilt before we punish people.
I urge the justice department to live up to it's name and do something about this pissing in the face of due process. And if the military commanders are outside their jurisdiction go after their civilian leaders.
PS
I don't care if Guantanamo stays open or not as long as the behavior is corrected. But if they do close it I also have no problem with the prisoners being put in the prison hospital a block from my house. I know that prison breaks are rarer than tv would have you believe and I think my town is just about the last place a potential terrorist would want to escape.
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