Creating Fresh Meat for Al Qaeda at Guantanamo

Afghanistan is a country with a tribal structure. In the war of 2001, the Pashtun tribes allied with the Taliban without thinking twice. There were neither desertions nor crises of conscience. And then there were tribes that refused to bear arms in exchange for a certain quantity of money. A tribal country… but very susceptible to economic transactions. In those battles there were massive captures of prisoners, who, when they belonged to an especially hostile clan, were sent to Guantánamo. Guantánamo, where they detained terrorists, suspected terrorists and many adolescents captured with guns in their hands who scarcely knew why they were going to war—they had been told it was God’s will.

These adolescents—like that fifteen-year-old Canadian whose idiot of a father had him brought up next to Bin laden—have been in Guantánamo for seven years, locked up, isolated and subjected to disturbing interrogations by specialists at breaking the deepest foundations of mental resistance. Trapped in a round-up, with neither a charge nor treatment as prisoners of war. Clearly both Obama and McCain propose doing away with such an absurdity. Thus it is not improbable that they will be freed from infernal limbo and returned to their country.

In seven years, these prisoners have had time to feed their rancor against our system. In their land, too, they would have had their punishments, but there they would have known that they played by their rules, with their familiar codes of honor and vengeance. Theirs. And now we have to return these prisoners to a country at war, where the Taliban are again emerging. Free, with an intolerable burden of rancor on their backs, and, at their side, their buddy, the Taliban.

Our mistakes could have the result of converting an astounded boy into a terrorist through and through. Fresh meat for Al Qaeda. So that in the last lines of this idiotic story, there will still be someone who can say, “You see how I knew he should have been locked in Guantánamo, and never freed? You see how we guessed that this boy was born to be a terrorist?”