By Georgie Anne Geyer
Fri Jun 17, 5:42 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- <snip> One of the family recalled the elder Mayor Daley's consistent opposition to the Vietnam War, a stance that was unusual in his time and certainly among his working-class constituents. The no-nonsense mayor told President Lyndon B. Johnson in no uncertain terms to get out: "When you're dealt a bad hand," Daley was quoted as saying, "get out of the game." <snip>
We have enough to shame us: the sadism and masochism of the Americans in Abu Ghraib (for which only the lowest soldiers paid), the Koran mess at Guantanamo (the military keeps coming up with new figures on who abused the Koran, until it's almost grotesquely comical), and even the horrible beating to death of a clearly innocent Afghan at Bagram in Afghanistan (reports afterward said his legs were "beaten to pulp" by American soldiers).
Guantanamo has become the moral symbol to the world of these depredations. Being on the island of Cuba, it had the status from the beginning of a kind of off-shore illegal and illegitimate den of iniquity. Is holding onto it really so important? Or is it just another of the obscene gestures of this administration toward not only the world, but toward the principles and institutions that historically have defined this country?
The United States has brought charges against only four of the 520 prisoners still held in Guantanamo. I, at least, am not clear on how many of the Gitmo prisoners have genuine cases against them, but we do know that from 80 percent to 90 percent of the Abu Ghraib prisoners are now declared to have been innocent men. We also know that this administration's obsession with the war on terror has led them to turn their backs on many of our most precious values: the rights of even prisoners under the law, the traditional American ban against torture, and our adherence to the Geneva Accords, which were originally hammered out to protect our own soldiers and to gradually introduce and enforce civilized norms of warfare to the rest of the world. <snip>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ucgg/20050617/cm_ucgg/theworldwatchesasusavoidstheshamefulglare/nc:742