GUANTANAMO, a.k.a the Shame of America, turned 20 yesterday. It was specially built to torture Muslims, and innocent ones at that. John Gray, a former professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, says, "it has become part of Western discourse to link terrorism with Arab culture", in his book, Black Mass.
Make that Muslims, for Guantanamo is "home" to more than Arab Muslims. Peter Oborne, a former journalist with the Daily Telegraph, writing in the Middle East Eye, has this to say on the West's war on terror: "In the jingoistic post-9/11 atmosphere, Muslims were deemed by many in the West to be undeserving of basic human rights.
It is inconceivable that the British government would have stood by as a white Christian Briton was tortured and imprisoned in Cuba; in the case of British Muslims, however, they considered it unproblematic." Most are there because of mistaken identity.
Torture of the cruellest kind imaginable, including that carried out during the Spanish Inquisition, is a daily occurrence. If any of them were guilty, they could have been put on trial and punished.
That is what the civilised world would do. But the United States chose barbarity over civilisation. The US and the rest of the West need an education.
Terrorism is not a Muslim invention. The West had been at it for the longest time. Only that they call it war. The West has been wrong for so long that it thinks it is right.
"Terrorism" is a result of the US invasion of Iraq. According to Gray, a classified report by 16 American agencies that was leaked in September 2006 pointed to the centrality of the US invasion of Iraq in fomenting terrorism throughout the world. Geopolitical experts had long warned of the insurgency should Iraq be attacked.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. But they invented them. The United Nations Charter forbade the invasion. Still, the West went ahead. Look at how Saddam Hussein was treated by the US.
Why a kangaroo court when he could have been properly tried in The Hague by the International Criminal Court? After all, the ICC was up and running on July 1, 2002. We think this to be the reason. First of all, the West's invasion led by the US was illegal.
This was the view of no less than the then secretary-general, Kofi Annan. He was right. There was no actual or imminent threat of an armed attack by Iraq.
The British attorney-general Lord Goldsmith's advice on March 7, 2003, to the then prime minister Tony Blair published by The Guardian makes this crystal clear. Interestingly, Goldsmith concluded with a warning: "But regime change cannot be the objective of military action."
Now we know from what happened since then that regime change was indeed the motive of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The West must be either naive or insane to do all this and expect no Iraqi insurgency. No, it wasn't a war on terror as the Americans would like to call it.
It was a forever war to bring about a regime change, not just in Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world. Just as this Leader went to press, another is being talked up with Iran.
The West cannot bear too much reality. For, if it could, it will not use its bullets to determine who should rule in these countries.
