Last week I attended the Cleveland Cavaliers game against the New Jersey Nets. During a timeout they showed on the scoreboard a soldier who was attending the game. Normally in a situation like this, the soldier is someone who has returned to town after serving a tour in Iraq or Afghanistan. On the scoreboard they said the soldier had been serving at Guantanamo Bay. I was wondering why they were saluting this guy. He wasn't in harm's way at Guantanamo and he very well could have been torturing people there. But a lot of people are stationed at Guantanamo. There was no way to know whether or not he was one of the torturers. Until today.
I open up my copy of today's Plain Dealer, and I see an op-ed piece that has a picture of the guy I saw on the scoreboard at the basketball game. It turns out the guy's name is Bruce Vargo, and he is the commander of the detention center at Guantanamo. He's running the place where they're torturing detainees, the head torturer. Why are the Cleveland Cavaliers saluting the commander of America's torture chamber? It's bad enough to live in a country that tortures people, and most people don't care. It's even worse to live in a country where they honor and salute the torturers.
