Keep Guantanamo Open

... and throw everyone who was ever a member of the Bush administration in it:

Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent
men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish
enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush
administration official said Thursday.

Oh for fucks sake. This isn’t a surprise (to anyone who is informed by sources more reliable than 24, anyway), but it’s just wonderful to hear it from someone who could have said it years ago from a position of relative prominence. Thanks for waiting, jerk! Well at least all these misunderstandings have been cleared up by now-

"There are still innocent people there," Lawrence B.
Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The
Associated Press. "Some have been there six or seven
years."

Oh. Quite right.

Wilkerson is doing the right thing- and who knows, maybe the fact that it’s coming from a Republican will help convince some conservatives that torturing random Muslims doesn’t necessarily help anyone*. Doing the right thing now, though, is pretty much the definition of ‘too little too late.’ Anyone want to seriously debate whether or not others in the White House were aware of this as well? Luckily we don’t have to, because Wilkerson took care of that for us:

Wilkerson wrote that "U.S. leadership became aware
of this lack of proper vetting very early on and,
thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were
innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little
intelligence value, and should be immediately
released."

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice
President Dick Cheney fought efforts to address
the situation, Wilkerson said, because "to have
admitted this reality would have been a black mark
on their leadership."

If President Obama can’t find a way to immediately close the place, perhaps he could find some new inmates for it? By their own standards these guys are perfectly eligible for Gitmo prisoner status, let’s get some mileage out of it before it closes for good!

*This is a joke- nothing will ever convince them of that. I’ll refer you to the GOP primary debates, where the only person who didn’t come out of the gates enthusiastically fawning over the wonders of torture was the man who had literally been tortured himself.