Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Bomb Guantanamo?


The Pentagon is always hatching potential military operations, like some egg farm in Aliens, and as a Quaker, I'm mostly repulsed by the ugly stupidity of it all.

However, given the president's fond hope that Guantanamo be shut down, and given the enormous resistence he's encountering in the form of foot dragging ("but... but..."), I think this plan to just level the place has some appeal.

We'd get the POWs out of course, and the personnel (if some captain wants to "go down with the ship" I suppose that could be arranged).

The POWs deserve some R & R, no matter how dangerous someone thinks they may be. Any humane code of ethics, even a penal one, would demand it.

Saudis own a lot of off shore islands in North Carolina or someplace. The Brits have property. Why not something cushy for a change, complete with flat screen TV?

They could watch our USAF coordinating with the Cuban Air Force, sending Guantanamo to a richly deserved oblivion.

The only real problem with this plan: Cuba may want to keep Gauntanamo intact for tourism.

It'll be like one of those concentration camp sites in Germany, but better preseved, perhaps with some Disneyesque audio- animatronics, showing how prisoners were abused for some number of years. Like, of course they're dangerous, even if they weren't to begin with.

USAers won't be forbidden to visit Cuba by then (having thrown off their would-be tyrant masters), so there'll be lots of traffic. And we'll finally have the freedom to tell it like it was. The POWs will get their say as well, for the archives and for the viewers in the Visitors Center.

I'm thinking as a compromise we should go ahead and give the green light to the Pentagon's hawks, and bomb at least a little. Then let's preserve the balance for history and forensics, until people get tired of remembering the hell on earth some tried to establish, and our victory over their kind.