The Inconvenient Truth – America's Gulags

President Bush has publically acknowledged the existence of the secret prison system, but few details have since emerged. 

How many of these detention centers are there and how many people are being detained? Well, we simply don’t know.

“There have been some reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere,” said Lee, “but really the impression is this is just the tip of the iceberg. Honestly, nobody knows how many people the U.S. is holding and where they are being held. That is a big problem.”

The U.S. government, he said, is certainly never going to give a full inventory of these secret prisons. “People find out about them, and I think for some of them the transit point for prisoners has been in the European Union,” Lee said, but whenever there is a report about the alleged location of a prison it breaks all sorts of local laws and conventions, “So I think the U.S. has to move these things further and further underground .”

And, of course, further away from public scrutiny and the eyes of the court system.

Strange that we are talking about the United States, because all of this does sound so much like Chile under Pinochet, or the Soviet Union under Stalin. And this is no conspiracy theory, it’s an admitted fact. Secret prisons, torture, destruction of evidence.  A U.S. gulag archipelago stretching around the world. A scary thought, isn’t it?

Perhaps it has always been like this, and through the arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration, we are only now beginning to discover the truth. Who knows?

There is still that question hanging, though. That moral dilemma. As Lee put it, if you had a suspect who knew where the ticking bomb was located, would you use torture to save innocent lives?

But before you answer, remember, it’s a slippery slope. How do you know you have the right man? Before you know it, you could be saying, “Better safe than sorry, torture them all.”

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