If you want to know something about the nature of truth and the evil a state is capable of, watch this 3 hour interview with most tortured person in Guantamo Bay, and then read the wiki page about him. You won't regret it.
The end may sound uplifting, and Slahi made peace with his torturers and is even a close friends to one of them, both godfathers to each other's kids. You should keep in mind though they broke him and and it might a case of traumatic bonding, like with the Stockholm syndrome.
At one point one of his American captors told him: It does not matter whether you are innocent or not. And after what has already been done to you by us, you can not be innocent. And in that mindset they tortured him until he confessed to literally everything they suggested.
You really want to hear the details, and you may think of Jordan Peterson what you want, but he is brilliant communicator and did a terrific job with this interview, so even if you may have reservations about Peterson, this is not about him, but about Slahi.
The tragic thing is that the U.S. government has not learned from this screwup, we can currently see this with Julian Assange, who dared to challenge and humiliate the most powerful state in the world, and the state just won't let it go.
I think the rationale behind it is to deter people following Assange's example, but to the world it just makes the U.S. governent lool like an evil, stupid bully with no regards for the rule of law, human beings or the values it claims to embody.
I know a few people quite well who work at high levels of the U.S. Government, and most of them I consider as good, intelligent and thoughtful people, and even Slahi's torturers did not seem to be specially evil or depraved persons.
However, also among the people Slahi encountered, many knew what they were doing is wrong and refused to be a part of it, but none of them managed to put a stop to all of this, and Slahi was kept in solitary confinement for a decade even after it became clear that he is innocent.
And after the truth started to come out, the government did all it could to blame Slahi, and even used the tortured confessions to manipulate his lawyers into disbelieving him, while withholding all the evidence that persuaded the government he is innocent.
I can totally understand how it happened in the first place that he was considered to be a high ranking, dangerous terrorist close to Bin Laden, but there is no excuse for torture, and there is no excuse for what they did after they knew he was harmless and innocent.
In a world ruled by law, where people are held resonsible for their actions, everyone involved in authorizing, participing in and covering up the whole mess would face consequences. Having people like that continue performing functions in politics and government and even ...
...reward them for the crimes they did, is incredibly damaging to the state and it's authority. It weakens the state like a sickness, and it can spread. It destroys respect for institutions, and makes people less likely to believe offical authorities.
The pattern of ignoring the absence of evidence and believing in rumors and phantasies and trying to shape reality by lies and force seems familiar to me. I don't know if there is a direct link between the crimes commited in the "war on terror" or the lies that fueled it,...
...but I see at least a similar pattern, and there may be at least some epic justice in that the disregard for law and lack of a minimum of human decency, that made the torture of Slahi happen, also almost destroyed the U.S. government when a mob overran the U.S. Senate.
The terrorists won. Terror does not aim at killing people or destroying infrastructure, it is targeted a people's minds, but instead of denying the terrorists that victory and respond in the measured way that would be approropriate for a democratic superpower, ...
...the U.S. went bonkers like a child and started to torture and kill people all over the world, most of them having nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attacks on the U.S., fueling more terrorism and wasting huge ressources on fighting unwinnable wars.
The saddest thing is that no lessons seem to have been learned, and the current U.S. government still keeps 39 people imprisoned in Guantanamo bay, altough like all previous presidents since Obama Biden stated his intentions to close it.
The way the U.S. government has is trying to punish Julian Assange, after even plotting to assassinate him, does not look like the U.S. government is something you can trust or believe in when they claim to make the world a better place. They don't walk their talk.
Sorry for the typos, I accidentally pressed send before I could read it, but I will keep it that way now.
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