In 2002, over 15 years ago the most powerful empire on earth built a prison.
Which in and of itself wasn't all that unique. After all, this Empire had more prisoners than any other nation on Earth.
But this prison was special.
Because it wasn't meant to house prisoners from within the Empire. It wasn't even built on their land.
It was not meant to be seen.
It was built for torture.
I imagine that Guantanamo Bay detention center will go down in history as one of the worst decisions of the early 21st century,
or at the very least it should.
If any other nation had a prison like this,
kept intentionally outside their borders for purposes of torture, and made legal through secret military courts,
we North Americans would be outraged.
We'd decry it as evil.
We would say that it is a clear example of our moral superiority,
why our freedoms are greater than theirs.
But this is our prison. It is a stain on our culture, on our society.
I'm Canadian, but I grew up in Texas, California and Maryland.
I've always felt a little American, or at the very least that Americans were among my people.
So for those of you who aren't, forgive me if I speak directly to them.
Writing today's episode has been painful for me. I simply don't want it to be true.
Researching this has been difficult, not because the information isn't available,
but because the facts I had to learn make me fear my own society.
The choices we've made in building and sustaining this prison have made us worse people.
It has decayed the very values that we as North Americans claim as our own.
This is an example of what happens when we lose sight of our humanity,
of the rights that we fought so hard to instill in this world.
War is hell, but that does not mean we have to become the devil.
How can we possibly demonize others when we say it's okay, that we are demons ourselves?
And I'm sure that some of you are thinking, "Well, they deserved it. These are the worst of the worst, they're terrorists".
And I think in some cases, that's an argument that has merit.
We couldn't let September 11th go unpunished, its masterminds had to be caught,
and locking them up assures that they won't be able to do this again.
Killing them makes it even more assured. That's realpolitik.
And if that were the case, I probably wouldn't even be here making this story.
It wouldn't have stood out to me.
In war, people die.
But this wasn't war, America needed to make that clear to avoid the Geneva Convention.
If it was war, they wouldn't be allowed to do this.
After all, many people in Guantanamo weren't guilty,
and I don't mean from my point of view, or even from a Johnnie Cochran-style lawyerism.
Internal government memos show that from the beginning,
they knew that many of these men were not what they were claimed to be.
Many were so low in the world of terror, they would have barely even registered on America's radar, if at all.
Others were just in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name,
sold to America by bounty hunters looking to collect a reward.
But once they were in the camp, they had to be guilty.
Politically, I mean. Because what happens when America admits that it's secret prison is housing innocent men,
torturing innocent men?
They are the most powerful empire on Earth. What type of precedent does this set for international law?
What happens when those men come back to society and begin to talk about what they endured?
Even though I don't want to get into the nuts and bolts, I do want to take a minute to highlight some of what happened to them.
Because again, I want to point out that these were men with no legal recourse,
with no habeas corpus, completely outside the Geneva Convention.
Prisoners in Guantanamo were humiliated and beaten. Force-fed and kept awake for days.
Heads were slammed into concrete floors. Some were waterboarded hundreds of times.
Others were violated anally and had fake menstrual blood smeared on their face while they were forced to act like dogs.
One American soldier pretending to be a prisoner while taking part in a training exercise
was beaten so badly he suffered brain damage and a lifetime of seizures.
He had a safe word, but they didn't listen.
Only once they tore off his clothing and saw his uniform underneath did they stop the beating.
That's what they did to their own people.
When over a hundred detainees attempted a hunger strike,
they shoved the same tube down their noses without a sedative one by one, a definition of torture.
When it came out that three of them had committed suicide,
the military said that they weren't trying to kill themselves,
it was an act of aggression against America.
They didn't want to die, they wanted to harm American morale.
But it turns out they probably didn't even do it to themself.
Internal investigations found it far more likely that they died under intense torture,
torture that the military admits does not provide useful information.
At least, they admit it when talking about other countries.
These are the lies we're telling ourselves to feel better about what we're doing.
We are so far down this rabbit hole
that we think it's better to say that we forced potentially innocent men to suicide
than the story of what actually happened.
That's the reality of it.
We were supposed to win hearts and minds, that was the plan. At least the propaganda.
Whose hearts and minds I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't winning mine.
If this offends me this much, imagine how helpful this is for the terrorists cause.
By all accounts a man in my position should be on board with this.
I'm pro-american, I have no love for terrorism.
Some of the men in this camp did unspeakably horrible things. They deserved punishment.
But what was the cost of punishing them?
What was the benefit that we got from doing it this way? Did it actually outweigh the harm?
I'm a realist. I know the world's not perfect, and America is not the worst empire we've seen or will see.
Many of the things they've done since taking preeminence have been incredible.
Specifically, their push for international human rights,
the development of the United Nations, the Geneva Convention,
and thousands of other small victories,
won by great men and women under the watchful eye of American power,
has led to a world where many of us feel that civilians should not be destroyed simply because a powerful state says they should be.
But I also know they're not Jesus. No powerful country would allow itself to be bombed without retaliation.
Empires rarely turn the other cheek.
Have our recent wars really calmed things down? What have we achieved?
Do we have less terrorism than before we started all this?
Is Afghanistan stable? Is Iraq on the road to freedom?
How has our work in Libya and Syria turned out? Is this the right way forward?
You cannot imprison the entire world.
The more people you lock up, the more people you'll have trying to break open the cells.
I want terrorism at an end just as much as you do. Perhaps more, but that's the key here.
What is Guantanamo really doing?
At its height, it didn't even hold a thousand men, and of those hundreds were potentially innocent of the crimes they were accused of.
If our number one goal is ending anti-western terrorism, not for today, but forever,
does this not hurt that cause? Is it not a lightning rod for thousands, if not millions of new malcontents?
We're shooting ourselves in the foot and calling it a bull's-eye.
That's the reality of Gitmo.
This is Rare Earth.