Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

The Taliban website is down again, i.e., it is unavailable in the U.S. But, they still have a Twitter page, and that's where I go now. They have this article about 5 former Guantanamo Bay inmates who were freed in a prisoner exchange in 2014, where the Taliban released 1 U.S. soldier in exchange for 5 of theirs: these five. And now these 5 former Guantanamo Bay inmates are sitting across from American generals and admirals at the negotiating table in Qatar. 

Were these guys ever terrorists? We wouldn't be negotiating with them if they were, would we? I'm sure they were fighting us back in 2001. I don't doubt that. But, we crossed an ocean to attack their country. We may have crossed two oceans. Our ships had to cross the Atlantic, but then what? Did we go all the way around the horn of Africa to enter the Indian Ocean to get to them? Or did we traverse the entire length of the Mediterranean Sea and then go through the Suez Canal and down the long length of the Red Sea and then through the Arabian Sea to get to them? I don't know which route we took, but either way, it was one hell of a long journey. It was half-way around the world. And that's as far away as you can get because if it was any farther, you could just go the opposite direction. We went all that way just to start a war.  No war existed, but the nightmare, the horror, and the unspeakable misery and death of war was what we wanted. And we don't let anyone question our right to have a war if and when we want one. No nation gets to judge us. We get to judge anyone else who starts a war. We get to condemn other nations for starting wars, but no one gets to condemn us because, well, we are the United States, and the United States can have whatever war it wants. And even though we know beforehand that the killing and maiming are going to be horrific, we reserve the right to decide that it's "worth it." Some people will just have to die so that we can accomplish our objectives, whatever they may be, and even though the vast and overwhelming majority of the people we kill never took any action against us and never thought to, we have dominion over their lives; we have dominion over all lives on Earth. That is what "American exceptionalism" is all about.