Today's Washington Post has an article on 82 inmates at Guantanamo Bay prison who have actually been cleared of all charges, but are still being held.
Nobody in charge has a good explanation for why the prisoners are still there. In some cases, it is because they themselves don't want to be deported back to their native lands, for fear of reprisals against them. Though eventually found innocent, the stigma of being branded not only a terrorist, but the "worst of the worst" by the Bushinistas, apparently lingers.
The U.S. government won't give them asylum, either, despite the fact that they created the situation in the first place, and most European nations won't let them in, either, apparently because The Decider told them not to.
The most interesting part of the article is this: According to U.S. government officials, of the roughly 385 people held at Guantanamo, only about 60 to 80 are due to be tried. The rest will be freed, eventually.
So they're innocent, right? Yet they're still held, still subjected to interrogation and torture and God knows what else, still victims of the capricious whims of an administration so utterly lacking in any kind of moral sense as to defy imagination, forced to act in a cruel farce even Joe Orton couldn't have penned.
Much of this nation and most of the rest of the world decries this madness, and yet it continues. A billion voices raised in protest cannot stop this. Can anything?
