Dear Guantanamo

I used to not be a fan of Guantanamo. In fact, I listened intently as lawyers who volunteered their time to defend those detained in Cuba explained the grievances against their clients. I could quickly re-articulate every reason for closing Guantanamo. When my best friend told me “I bet most of the people there are bad men” I completely scoffed – how the hell would she know?

Granted, it would not surprise me if out of the many dozens of detainees held, a few were simply caught up in the ruckus and hullabaloo that follows an American GI calling in an air raid. Life is full of “wrong place, wrong time” scenarios and they increase exponentially during times of war. The dastardly actions of these plain-clothes combatants, sadly, make this scenario even more likely. Perhaps if terrorists wore uniforms, these situations wouldn’t occur with such frequency. But collateral damage has never really been a concern for these people.

But Thomas Sowell pointed out something that I had never thought about and is consistently ignored by pop news media: if you ignore the Geneva Convention, the protections of the Convention do no apply to you.

Here is something else he said:

There was a time when everybody understood this. German soldiers who put on American military uniforms in order to infiltrate American lines during the Battle of the Bulge were simply lined up against a wall and shot – and nobody wrung their hands over it. Nor did the U.S. Army try to conceal what they had done. The executions were filmed, and the film has been shown on the History Channel.

Someone pointed out to me that if we "torture" people, we're behaving just like the terrorist. I was fairly offended by this statement. Our troops don't hand 9-year-old children AK-47s. We wear uniforms so the enemy combatants know who to shoot! We will never be on the same level as the terrorist, even if we practiced waterboarding on a regular basis.

Our version of "torture" isn't exactly like theirs, either. I don't personally know if waterboarding is torture but on the list of things that may fall under that category, it's the best option on the list. It's better than what the terrorist do - brand, rape, maim, pull fingernails out, electrocute, etc., correct? Yeah, pretty much.

If you don’t play fair, you don’t get “tried fair”. The punishment should fit the crime – as should the trial… err, indefinite holding period.