UN to US: Close Gmo

A United Nations report today said the U.S. should either release Guantanamo Bay prisoners or put them on trial. It also called for the closing of the facility, saying practices there "amount to torture."

The U.S. rejected the report.

Well, neither is any surprise. The Bush administration's policy of never apologizing for anything is beginning to make sense. After bending the U.S. constitution, instituting torture as a matter of U.S. policy, holding prisoners without trial for lengthly periods of time condemning thousands of people -- some who have engaged in armed activity but many who haven't -- to a life of hell, and contracting with the worse security forces in the world in a policy of rendition and torture, how can they apologize now?

Let's be clear why all of this is problemmatic, and why the U.S. should follow the advice of the U.N. report to close the Gmo facility. It's about defining what our military is doing in Iraq. What happens at Gmo, what happens with illegal renditions, actually goes a long way to define whether our military is an army of occupation or liberation, whether we overthrew Saddam Hussein to make a stand for democracy and human rights or whether we are a bully. We can complain only for so long that the "bad guys" are worse than us -- and they are. But if we take on the aspects of the bad guys to fight us, we're not going to accomplish anything other than killing a lot of people and damaging a lot more.

Here's what others are saying about the UN report:
Three Wise Men says the report confirms the wrongfulness of our policies.