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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/3/13

Why Closing Guantanamo Is Easy: Obama Doesn't Need Congress -- He Needs Travelocity

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Guantanamo is complicated. Everyone says so.

Everyone is wrong.

There's nothing complicated about it. Guantanamo should be closed.

Mainstream media pundits don't get it. They suggest a lame hodgepodge of solutions: a few repatriations here, a few extraordinary renditions there, maybe convincing some allies to take the victims of our stupid "war on terrorism."

Immoral and idiotic.

All of the detainees -- every last one of them, the schlubs who have been officially cleared by the Pentagon and, yes, even the scary dudes the government insists are "the worst of the worst" -- can, should and -- if the United States Constitution means anything at all -- must be released.

Here.

In the United States.

I don't find myself saying this very often, but President Obama is finally talking about doing something right. Granted, he let five years pass before he took the problem seriously. It took a hunger strike, now entering its fourth month, which could begin claiming the lives of some of the more than 100 participating POWs, to get his attention. Even now, he is violating the detainees' human rights and the standards of the American Medical Association by violently shoving feeding tubes up their noses to --irony alert! -- save their lives. Still, better late than never: Obama (finally) says he wants to fulfill his 2008 campaign promise by closing this monstrosity.

"Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe," he told a news conference. "It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us, in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed."

So close it. You don't need Congress. All you need is a Travelocity account.

When Obama became president in 2009, there were 245 prisoners at Gitmo. Now there are 166. (None have been released since 2011, which demoralized the remaining prisoners to the point that many are willing to die from hunger.) Some of these wretches been there since the concentration camp -- look it up, there is no better term for it -- opened 12 years ago.

It's been ages. Three inmates arrived at Gitmo as children. As they passed through adolescence and entered adulthood, they were tortured, abused, and denied basic human rights by American soldiers and CIA agents, left to rot in American dog cages. (At least 28 children have done time there.)

American officials worry that their experience may have radicalized them. How could it not? If it hasn't, they must be insane.

The horrors are just beginning to come out. A Spanish investigation censored in U.S. media found that American soldiers have abused Gitmo prisoners with "blows to [the] testicles," "detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep," being "inoculated...through injection with 'a disease for dog cysts,'" smearing feces on prisoners and (of course) waterboarding.

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Ted Rall, a political cartoonist, is the author of "The Anti-American Manifesto." He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1963, raised in Kettering, Ohio and graduated from Fairmont West High School in 1981. His first cartoons were published (more...)
 

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