America’s official involvement in Afghanistan ended December 28, 2014. A prisoner of war inmate at Guantanamo captured in Afghanistan in 2002 thought, logically enough, that since the US was no longer at war in Afghanistan, he should be released. Yet according to Judge Royce C. Lambeth, the war isn’t over and he denied the prisoner’s request. He said:
The government may not always say what it means or means what it says.
Now anybody who has ever dealt with the government knows that Judge’s Lambeth statement is often correct, perhaps more often than not, but the outcome is manifestly unjust. If the same logic had applied at the end of WWII, we might still be housing German or Japanese prisoners of war. The case highlights the absurdity of the US war on terror. It’s a war on a tactic, against whomever the US government says is a terrorist, fought anywhere the government thinks there are terrorists, it often creates more of the terrorists it is meant to eradicate, and consequently, it will never be won and will never end. See “Afghanistan: The Forever War.”
