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Much like virtually every other Bush administration creation, Guantanamo Bay is an American embarassment, a symbol of corruption and stupidity conveniently located beyond the reach of traditional human rights protections.

There are 335 prisoners remaining at the prison. According to U.S. officials, 80 of these prisoners will go on trial, and the rest will be released.

At the Abu Ghraib detention facility, innocent people were tortured, raped, and murdered. According to Kasim Mehaddi Hilas (detainee No. 151108), and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, those raped included an underage boy. This act of degradation was videotaped, and the Pentagon remains in possession of this video. The military personnel involved were given slaps on the wrist.

Michael Keller, a member of the Army National Guard who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, has written that numerous children were raped at the prison, and that his attempts to stop such atrocities were met with threats of punishment from his superiors.

The U.S. eventually handed Abu Ghraib over to the Iraqis. But Guantanamo Bay remains ours. The Red Cross has described interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay as being "tantamount to torture."

The American people know that this prison holds innocent people. We know that torture is a barbaric and ultimately useless interrogation tactic. We know that it's wrong to imprison innocent people, and to keep them imprisoned after they have been declared innocent.

But we have also been trained to get on our knees in front of authority. We have been conditioned to jump whenever a preacher, politician, or marketing executive says "jump." And so we hang portraits of President Bush in our churches, just as Iraqi Muslims dedicated portraits and statues to Saddam Hussein. We look the other way when the CIA tortures people, just as the Iraqis looked the other way when Saddam Hussein tortured people. We rationalize our brutality with claims of patriotism. We wave the American flag as if we understand what it's supposed to symbolize.

President Bush claims that we must torture people to keep America safe, that we must imprison the innocent to protect the innocent. Of course, when the moment arrives that we are all in agreement, that we are all in lockstep with this brutal and backwards philosophy of justice, there will no longer be any need to secure the safety of this country, because its founding ideals and the exceptional character of its people will have been lost to the same fate that greeted Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini.

Get up off your knees, America. Demand an end to Guantanamo Bay.

Learn more about this author, Jonathan Young.
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