Why Gitmo?

Here’s a riddle, the answer to which might clear up a whole lot of foggy thinking. It is this: Why is there a prison at Guantanamo?

I don’t know the answer, but do know some non-answers:

• It is not there to hold dangerous prisoners. The US routinely kills people it thinks dangerous. If they thought these people represented a true danger, they would have murdered them.
• It is not due to alleged crimes. There are no such things as crimes in this current system, only punishment. The detainees are indeed being punished, but we do not know for what purpose.
• They are not being held there for torture. They might indeed have been tortured, they might be running experiments on more effective techniques (in making lamp shades?), but if they wanted to torture these people, they would not choose a publicly known location. They would have done so at a secret site, and probably have.
• They have not been sentenced, and will only stand trial under extreme publicity. Trials cannot be public! as they might talk about their treatment, or worse yet, the fact that they had no military intelligence value, calling into question, again, the real purpose(s) for the existence of this facility.

Given what we know it is not, what could it be?

• Precedent – it could be that Gitmo was set up to establish the sovereign right to capture and detain people and hold them without judicial proceeding. This is an important element of fascism – the all-powerful state cannot be held accountable.
• They screwed up. They had ideas about running a secret torture facility there, but word got out and they had to operate it as a semi-public facility.
• Training – it could be that the prisoners there are mere window dressing, and that the real purpose is to serve as a training facility for terrorists, agents provocateur, bomb specialists and infiltrators. (If a terrorist incident happens and appears to have no strategic or tactical consequence – say a market square bomb in Beirut – the odds are that western agents are behind it. Then it does make sense – to stir unrest, scare people, and justify intervention. Most of what we call terrorist bombings originate in Langley or MI5-6 or Tel Aviv and are pulled off by low-intelligence dupes like Shoe Bomber, acting under management of western intelligence.)

It must be clear here that I do not know the answer and if it is ever revealed will probably be as surprised as anyone. Furthermore, it could be a combination of factors, all of the above and then some.

The one constant is this: They lie. We are not told anything true about anything. So speculation, even if idle, is useful.
____________
Sara Flounders, the head of the International Action Center, says Washington’s series of overseas prisons helps the US sidestep the Geneva Convention on the use of torture against prisoners.

“The idea of holding prisoners around the world in secret detention was that they were therefore, according to their twisted logic, immune to any international law, human rights law or conventions that the US had signed,” Flounders said. “The UN report said 27,000 prisoners had been held by the US in secret prisons in of course Afghanistan, Iraq, countries throughout Middle East, countries throughout Europe, in Africa; on more than 17 US ships there were secret prisons,” she added. “So this is really part of a vast scale, of thousands of people being held with absolutely no rights whatsoever and being subject to horrendous torture.”

The U.S. is indeed over.