Guantanamo Uighurs: the guards are more of a threat than they are

Caution: this is an extremely negative subject I'm writing about here. I don't want people to worry about me personally - I'm fine. This is just what I 'heard' when I woke up the other day.

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There was a major loss in the Guantanamo battle.

There was a court case over whether they would release the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), a group of people from China who we're pretty sure are innocent and weren't attacking the United States. The court case was lost - the Uighurs will stay where they are for now, in Guantanamo.

Catbert told Dilbert that he was an analog; all summer, I interacted with 'them' about how my own personal life was analogous to world events like the war in Iraq.

I woke up the other day and they were talking about being an 'analog,' and heard them telling me that this Guantanamo case represented another major loss analogous to my own battles I'm fighting. (Most of their attacks have to do with fecal material, so of course, they would have used the opportunity to mention the 'analog' joke.)

But, during this 'talk,' they said that the people deemed a security risk, if released from Guantanamo, weren't the prisoners. They're the guards and employees themselves.

If you release the guards and other employees from Guantanamo, and tell them 'You just spent seven years torturing helpless, weak, innocent people who did nothing wrong, and you gained no valuable information by doing so, and now we want you to go back to living a normal life,' then the guards are going to leave the prison, go home to their families, and go to work for about a week or two before they murder their wives and children and then kill themselves.

The prisoners of Guantanamo know themselves to be innocent. They are psychologically protected, to some tiny degree, by that knowledge. Knowledge of your own innocence is the last tiny shield you have when you are wrongfully convicted of a crime and tortured. In that way, the prisoners of Guantanamo are psychologically healthier than the guards.

The guards are the ones who can no longer be trusted to walk out into the world and refrain from shooting bullets into a crowd of strangers at the mall.

Also, we don't know what drugs they're on. A lot of people in the military are on antidepressants and other drugs. This makes them more obedient. If you suddenly give them new drugs, or stop the drugs they're on, or put them into a stressful situation while they're continuing to use those drugs even at the dosages considered 'normal,' there's a chance that those prison guards will 'go postal.' Former members of the military are ALREADY going postal. It wouldn't be quite so bad if they ONLY killed themselves, but the antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs seem to make people do a very consistent, reliable pattern of killing a bunch of random people and then killing themselves. (There have been some reports of military people who ONLY committed suicide, not homicide.) If you ever see news reports about the multiple-homicide-followed-by-suicide pattern, ALWAYS ask whether that person was using psychiatric drugs at the time. Drugs are such a strong cause of this behavior that they can almost be described as the ONLY cause of this behavior.

And now they're afraid to stop anything, afraid to change anything, afraid to remove those soldiers from Iraq, afraid to remove those guards from Guantanamo, afraid of what they'll do when they suddenly go back to normal life and they're expected to behave like decent human beings instead of people who obey authority and spend years torturing innocent prisoners because the government told them to.

The prisoners just want to go home and go back to living their peaceful, innocent lives, as they were doing before. They're not the ones with the problem.

That was what 'the voices' were talking to me about this morning. I think they can sympathize with that whole thing. If you spend years zapping people awake at night, zapping their thoughts while they try to meditate, ruining their relationships, forcing them to be someone else instead of being themselves, forcing them to say and do things that they would not otherwise have done on their own because somebody decided that it's 'for our own good' if we're forced to do this, then sooner or later you might feel like a bad person for doing that. I think those attackers know how it feels to be a prison guard at Guantanamo, and to be told that the prisoners are innocent, and the guards are no longer employed.

So it's a combination of being in the military, going back to a normal life afterwards, using psychiatric drugs, and knowing that all of their atrocities were committed against normal, innocent people - THAT is the security risk. The prisoners themselves will probably be okay after they're released.