Never, ever, ever post to newspaper comments boxes.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever post to newspaper comments boxes.

Never. Ever. Ever.

I have to remember that.

I made the cardinal error of doing so last night, and now I’m in a fury over the whole thing. The responses to what was a very mild paragraph have been… stunning. I’m not exactly an interwebnology neophyte. I’ve spent some time knocking around with some pretty robust debators over the years since Tim Berners-Lee brought armchair wise-assery to every household with an internet connection.

These guys… yeesh.

So, look. It is not the case – not according to anyone, anywhere, who is in any way aware of what is going on there – that ‘every prisoner at Guantánamo is a dangerous bastard who would as soon kill you as argue with you, just for fun’. That is horseapples, folks, of the first and most brain-dead sort. And the way that you know that is that even the US government says so.

And then, beyond that, there’s the fact that many at Guantánamo simply aren’t the worst of the worst of terror. They may not even be the least of the least.

Basically, here’s the thing. There may be, of the three hundred-odd prisoners remaining in Gitmo, a few who are genuinely dangerous. The majority, however, are not, or at least, not really more so than any prisoner anywhere. They are taxi drivers from Karachi and goat-herders from Afghanistan. Many of them committed the sin of being informed against by someone who wanted the reward money, or are cases of mistaken identity. Some informants are making this into a business.

One inmate is considered particularly interesting because he confessed, when asked, that he knew where to get salad in his home town. Why would anyone care? Because a similar word in another dialect means ‘money’.

Gitmo is a screw-up. I have met former inmates. They are ordinary. Sweet, even. Boring, perhaps. And very confused. They are not frothing looneys with guns and explosives.

Gitmo is not a prison. It is an interrogation camp. It is a place where bad things happen. Gitmo is not an episode of Porridge where everyone wears robes. It’s a place where you get beaten, deprived of sleep, and waterboarded (which, incidentally, was definitely torture when the Japanese did it) and maybe worse.

One way to understand Guantánamo is by looking at what happened to Sean Baker (2):

Mr. Baker put on an orange prison jumpsuit over his uniform, and then crawled under a bunk in a cell so an ”internal reaction force” could practice extracting an uncooperative inmate. The five U.S. soldiers in the reaction force were told that he was a genuine detainee who had already assaulted a sergeant.

”They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he — the same individual — reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breathe. When I couldn’t breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’ . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: ‘I’m a U.S. soldier. I’m a U.S. soldier.’ ”

As far as I know, Baker has long-term brain damage from the incident. It is the most serious injury sustained by a guard at Guantánamo.

And none of this is helping us avoid another terror attack. None of it. In fact, it hurts us. Never mind for a second that we’re making the entire world hate us (and I do mean us, because the British government is heavily implicated in all this). This is about information. And information given under torture is rubbish. In fact, we may have gone to war over complete tripe.

So the really stupid thing about this is that it’s not even an argument about whether it’s morally repugnant to use torture on the ‘ticking bomb terrorist’. It’s just a bunch of people rounded up and stuck in a hole because we don’t know what else to do.

Thus, to all the nice people who lined up to tell me why Gitmo was a necessary, legitimate place full of ‘bad men’ (and I hadn’t even mentioned it, I was just saying I thought it was understandable people here in the UK felt Gary McKinnon was getting a raw deal):

you are wrong.

And to those of you who are even now stunned into silence by my oratory (I count… none):

give money. Make the world less bad.