The Real Reason Guantanamo Should Be Closed

Excerpt:

The reasons to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay are legion. But there is another reason Guantánamo should be closed that is rarely mentioned. The real reason that the prison at Guantánamo should be closed is that it is at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

But Guantánamo is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the Department of Defense’s “Base Structure Report” for fiscal year 2011, the Defense Department “manages a global real property portfolio consisting of more than 542,000 facilities (buildings, structures, and linear structures) located on nearly 5,000 sites worldwide covering more than 28 million acres.” Officially, there are 611 of these facilities in 39 foreign countries. Unofficially, however, there are hundreds more. Although the Base Structure Report lists 194 sites in Germany, 108 sites in Japan, and 82 sites in South Korea, the report lists no branch of the U.S. military’ having any bases in Afghanistan or Iraq, even though we know that there exist hundreds of “sites” in those two countries.

The late Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, and one of the foremost authorities on the subject, always maintained that the official Defense Department figures regarding overseas military bases were too low because they “omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude — e.g., Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.”

http://libertarianchristians.com/2012/02/09/close-guantanamo...