How U.S. officials can feed this stuff to the media with a straight face is beyond me. Apparently, even the Bush administration says many (100s) of the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility should be released. The U.S. Government wants to release them and send them back to their home countries. The U.S. won't release the detainees, however, because the governments in their home countries might torture them!
It's all right for the United States to torture the detainees, and it's all right to use extraordinary rendition to send people that the United States wants tortured to those same countries specifically so they will be tortured for any information they might have, but any torture not approved by the United States is not cool.
Interestingly, many of the detainees the United States wants to release are citizens of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (more than 100 from each country according to the NYTimes article linked above) -- U.S. allies. Also, the article reports that 267 detainees have already been sent home. These items leave me with some questions:
1) How have the 267 released detainees been treated at home? If the U.S. Government doesn't know what happened to them, does that mean this concern over detainee abuse is new? Can you say "mid-term elections"?
2) Why is the United States the only country that can decide when torture is acceptable? Moot point. Torture is never acceptable.
3) Why is the U.S. allied with countries that practice torture? I guess this one doesn't matter because we are the "good guys" which makes everything we do OK.
More later,
Russ
P.S. - The extraordinary rendition link above goes to a CBS News item on the practice. I thought about linking to the Wikipedia entry on the topic, but if you look at my last post, you'll see why I didn't.
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