The gulag at Guantanamo Bay has become so transparently outrageous that the only defense that the Bush Administration has left for keeping its illegal Guantanamo Bay torture camps open is to get whiny.

John Bellinger, a legal aide to the State Department, recently tried to defend keeping the secretive detention camps at Guantanamo Bay open by whining that there are “no easy alternatives”, and the Bush White House just can’t figure out how it could ever shut the system down. “I am sure that there are many things we would have done differently in looking back, but people captured in Afghanistan would have to have been held somewhere,” he said.

Here’s an idea that has occurred to a lot of people, but never seems to have come into Mr. Bellinger’s mind: The United States could just follow the law.

If there is solid, legal evidence that the prisoners committed crimes, then put them in prison in the United States and put them on trial. If some of the prisoners were captured on the battlefield, put them in proper prisoner of war camps that meet the standards of American and international law, including the Geneva Conventions. (Of course, prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are not, as Bellinger suggests, just from Afghanistan. They’ve been captured in Iraq, and snatched from many other places around the world as well.) If they are neither suspected of a crime, and were not captured on a battlefield, then let them go.

John Bellinger whines again about this possibility. He says some of the prisoners’ home countries won’t accept them back, or won’t guarantee that the prisoners won’t be abused in violation of international law. So, Bellinger suggests, they need to be kept in abusive conditions that violate international law in Guantanamo Bay. Once again, there’s an easy solution. If there is no evidence that these prisoners committed any crime, and they were not captured while fighting against the USA on a battlefield, and they’ve been imprisoned and tortured by the United States for years, then they seem to have earned the right to become American citizens. If no other country will accept them, the United States should.

The Bush Administration should stop its whining about how hard it is to close the Guantanamo Bay prisons, and just do it. In the space of a month, all the prisoners could be cleared from the place. But, the Bush Administration won’t do that, because they’re hoping that another right wing President will be elected to succeed George W. Bush. They’re hoping that the next President will continue the outrages of Guantanamo Bay. Let’s elect a progressive instead, and deny them their wish.

(Source: Earth Times, June 7, 2007)