In 1979, the Carter administration began funding and arming Afghan mujahideen fighters to destabilize a Soviet-aligned government, before the Soviet intervention, not in response to it. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, later confirmed this explicitly and described it as a deliberate strategy to bait the Soviets into their own Vietnam. The operation expanded massively under Reagan. Billions of dollars. Stinger missiles. Saudi co-financing. Pakistani intelligence as the delivery mechanism. One of the organizations that emerged from this infrastructure was al-Qaeda. When September 11th happened, the official American narrative described it as an attack on freedom by forces of pure evil who hated Western civilization for its values. This narrative did not include the chapter where Washington built the network. Did not include the chapter where the weapons were American. Did not include the chapter where Brzezinski, asked about the long-term consequences of his strategy, said the collapse of the Soviet empire was worth "stirring up some Muslims." The bill came due on September 11th, 2001. It was paid by people in office buildings who had never heard of Brzezinski or his strategy. That is what it means to manufacture terror and send the bill to the survivors.

They train the world's torturers. The School of the Americas, now rebranded because the name became embarrassing, has graduated thousands of Latin American military officers. Among its alumni: dictators, death squad commanders, the architects of systematic torture programs across the continent. This is documented. Declassified. Admitted. They teach it at Fort Benning, Georgia. And then they write reports about human rights abuses in Latin America. The reports are accurate. The abuses are real. The instructors are American.

Thank you for the numbers. Let's use them. 780 men detained. Fewer than 30 ever charged. That means roughly 96% of the men the United States held in Guantánamo Bay, some for years, some for over a decade, were released without ever being accused of a specific crime in any legal proceeding. You've just made the original argument more precisely than I did. A system that detains 780 people and charges 30 is not a justice system. Call it what you want. Don't call it justice. "Law-of-war detention reviewed by administrative boards" is a long phrase for a short reality: men held indefinitely without the rights your country grades other countries on providing. The numbers you cited are the indictment.