Dear Mr. Worthington,

By a long chain of unplanned internet travels, I ended up with one of your articles on Guantánamo (The Huffington Post), and certainly plan to read the others in due time.

Thank you for covering this shameful piece of internationally accepted, ‘democratic’, human rights abuse.

I just hope that ‘closing down’ Guantánamo, will mean giving ALL its inmates a trial (I dare not use the word ‘fair’) in a reasonably decent court, and not sending them off to their home country, or any other one where human rights abuses and torture are common.

In order to pretend its hands are clean, the Bush administration (I would not risk implying that he himself has enough brains to devise any of this) increasingly sub-contracts torture to less PR-conscious countries. Pontius Pilate would admire the scheme.

But block D in Pul-e Charkhi prison is no solution to a human rights crisis. On the contrary, to survive 6 years in Guantánamo without going stark mad, only to end up in block D, is possibly the most cruel torture of all.

Thank you again and kind regards.

“Thanks for the briefing! One thing I have never understood is why the Americans believe that those who have spent years in Guantanamo would not come out hating the USA — even (especially) if they were innocent in the first place. They can’t keep them imprisoned without spitting in the face of justice, and they can’t release them without risking their vengeance.”

And this was my reply:

“Thanks for the comments. I think the answer to your question concerns the nature of violence and of faith. If you’re not inclined to militarism and violence, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you will become so however you’re treated. As for faith, many of the prisoners have spoken about how their faith helped them through their ordeal, and, moreover, that it was God’s will that they were imprisoned, and it was not their place to question why Allah had allowed them to be imprisoned. In terms of being tested, there is, therefore, virtue attached to the endurance of unjust imprisonment.”

On reflection, I think that last line should have read:

“In terms of being tested, it’s possible to see that in some cases there is, therefore, virtue attached to the endurance of unjust imprisonment.”