Thoughts
by James Glaser
January 4, 2010

There is a lot of talk lately in Washington about how Iraq is now considered a past war, while Afghanistan is our current war, and Yemen will be our next war. They, our government officials in Washington, are telling us that the Christmas underwear bomber, on that flight to Detroit, was trained in Yemen. That makes Yemen our next target in our everlasting War on Terrorism.

Now I am thinking about why Yemen and the Yemeni people as they are now called want to attack us or train others to attack us. Here is what I come up with. Right now, today, we hold over 90 Yemeni nationals in our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We held more than that, but we have sent some home already.

Guantanamo Bay is not a resort. The people we have held there for the last eight years were at first kept in wire cages. They were tortured, and as one FBI Agent reported, some of the prisoners were beaten and chained to the floor until they soiled themselves and started ripping out their own hair. We admit that we tortured prisoners with water boarding over a hundred times a month. Some prisoners committed suicide.

Like I said, this has been going on for over eight years now, and you know the prisoners we sent back to Yemen have been telling their fellow countrymen what happened to them. And as if that weren't bad enough, we have been bombing Yemen with our unmanned predator drones.

So, Washington is now trying to tell us that terrorists from Yemen want to attack us, and we can't for the life of us figure out why. I have to think it is because we are terrorizing Yemen and its people.

Think about how we would feel if one hundred or more American men were held for eight years, and we knew they were being tortured, and some of them had already committed suicide. Don't you think we would be doing everything we could to get revenge? Just think about how many innocent people we have killed in getting our revenge for the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. There is little doubt that hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, civilians who had nothing at all to do with that attack have been killed by the United States.

Now when some country tries to get back at us for our attacks and our terrorism of its people, we are mystified as to why.

Washington is trying to figure out what to do with the 90 plus Yemeni prisoners we still hold. Those on the right think we should hold on to them forever. They think if we send them back home, they will want to help attack us. I would say they are right, but the men of Yemen are going to try and attack us as long as we hold their countrymen.

We are in a bad place. The whole world knows we have tortured prisoners to death. We even admit that. The whole world has seen the pictures of our torturing prisoners in Iraq. We will have to face the fact that we are the bad guys, and no matter what we say now or even what we do now, in the eyes of much of the world, we are wrong. We have killed and maimed millions. We have displaced millions. And now we are bombing targets in Yemen and Pakistan without even having the decency to declare a war.

Here is what we have declared. We now say we have the right to attack any one, any place, that we think might be thinking of harming us some time in the future.

Here is what President Obama says he is going to do with those Yemeni prisoners we still hold:

WASHINGTON—The United States will continue to repatriate Guantanamo detainees to Yemen, a country menaced by the Al-Qaeda terror network, despite the Christmas airliner attack, a White House official said Sunday.

President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said Yemeni nationals not transferred to US soil for trial or detention would be sent home.

"We haven't, you know, stopped the process as far as dealing with them," Brennan told CNN, referring to the roughly 90 Yemeni detainees who remain at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Sure, some of those prisoners, at least the ones we haven't driven totally insane, will want to get revenge for what we have done to them. Some day though, we have to become the good guys again, and we can't do that until we clean the slate of our past mistakes.

The United States should set the example of how we want other countries to behave, and torture and indefinite incarceration of other countries' nationals is not the way to go. If a country attacks us, then declare war and attack back. If a criminal group, that represents no nation attacks us, then treat them as the criminals they are.

After the 9/11 terrorist attack, the rest of the world backed us in going after al-Qaeda. However, now, for the most part we have lost that help, because of our killing of innocents, and the torture we employed.

If we really want to end this terrorism, America needs to take the high road. Otherwise we will continue to be thought of by much of the world as just another terrorist group.

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