I ran across this May 17 comment/rant from Bill O'Reilly:
"Go to LATimes.com. I want everybody in the country to read this editorial, 'cause it just -- I mean, you'll be sitting there pounding the table like I did. How can they -- how can they think this way? How can anyone think this way? You know, 'Shutting down Guantánamo and giving suspected terrorists legal protections would help restore our reputation abroad.' No, it wouldn't. I mean that's like saying, well, if we're nicer to the people who want to KILL US, then the other people who want to KILL US will like us more. Does that make any sense to you? Do you think Osama [bin Laden] is gonna be more favorably disposed to the U.S. if we give the Guantánamo people lawyers? I mean, but this is what they're saying. It is just -- you just sit there, you go, 'They'll never get it until they grab Michael Kinsley out of his little house and they cut his head off.' And maybe when the blade sinks in, he'll go, 'Perhaps O'Reilly was right.'"
Sure, you could fill a large barn with things that O'Reilly doesn't "get," but this is a simple one.
We don't do things like Guantanamo Bay because that is not who we are as a nation. We take freedom seriously, even for people who don't deserve it. We treat our citizens better than anyone else and we try to treat our enemies just as well. Not just because it's the right thing to do (although it is). And not just because excessive force and unfair incarceration almost backfires. We don't do it because it's not the American thing to do.
We are not supposed to lock up people for years without a trial, without access to a lawyer, without even admitting that we're holding them. We don't shuffle off prisoners to other countries so they can rough them up for us.
The irony of all of this is that we should have the moral high ground in this war. We don't behead our enemies, or design car bombs that knowingly blow up civilians. We are the type of country who usually cares about our enemies, even as we're fighting them. But somehow along the way, some of us have lost that confidence in America and its values. We're scared, and we're letting that fear and hate tarnish the very thing that we are supposed to be fighting for in the first place.
After two years, we have learned everything there is to learn from the Guantanamo Bay prisoners. It's time to put the ones who deserve it on trial, and release the rest. Or at least explain why we can't let them go quite yet.
This is not who we are. And I'm saddened to see how many conservatives just don't understand the concept.