EDITORIAL: Guantanamo Bay horror reaches out to Aurora and all of the United States

While far from Aurora and the multitude of issues people here and across the country face every day, the issue of the United State’s most egregious embarrassment affects us all.

More than 10 years after the Bush administration unwisely created Guantanamo Bay “detention camp” in Cuba, 166 eternal prisoners show how the most open, free and fair government in the world continues to make a mockery of itself. Last week, hunger strikers there drew attention to the quagmire surrounding Guantanamo Bay Prison. Sadly, it’s an issue Americans just don’t care about anymore.

For the sake of our nation and the prisoners, Congress and President Obama must move quickly and deliberately to resolve the unacceptable horror of a government that permits people to be held without due process, forever. The world looks to the United States to end such human rights abuses in backward nations all over the planet, not lead the way in skirting the rule of law.

While the men being held at Guantanamo Bay may be vile criminals who deserve harsh justice, we, as a country, have treated them unfairly and in patently un-American ways. The U.S. Supreme Court, the majority of Congress and Obama all agree with that, but the abuse still persists.

The Cuban island prison has drawn international scorn since it was created after the United States invaded Afghanistan after the 2001 terrorist attacks. There, hundreds of prisoners have been held for years without hope of ever being subjected to the tenets of justice that Americans have fought and died for generations.

While there are some, but few, options as to what to do with the prisoners, there is no doubt that leaving them there without some plan for immediate trials and either acquittals or convictions is not an option. And the Obama administration has made it clear there is little or no hope of that.

Congress was absolutely right to balk at Obama asking to close Guantanamo Bay in 2009 without a detailed plan from the administration as to who will go where and what will become of them if they’re sent to federal prisons here in the United States. But that same Congress has no business in keeping the administration from solving an exasperating problem that many of these federal lawmakers either helped create or were complicit in helping create. Many in Congress just stood by for nearly 11 years while the situation at Guantanamo worsened and options dwindled.

Few things have hurt the country’s image and ability to navigate through the political messes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have wrought upon the United States as has Guantanamo Bay prison. Nothing but the closure of this modern-day gulag will solve the problem no matter how difficult or distasteful the U.S. Congress finds the issue.

The country has numerous prisons capable of taking small numbers of these prisoners, when and if they are convicted of crimes. But American justice and our own culture of righteousness demands that these suspected terrorists be fairly tried, and those not convicted be freed. Anything less is as patently un-American as are the heinous acts these men are accused of committing.