It looks like the detention center/torture facility at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base may finally be closed (and the prisoners who are being held indefinitely without trial just moved to another facility for continued detention and torture). Congressional Democrats are apparently planning to fund just half of the requested budget for the prison facility to force its closure, especially now that it seems that Baby Bush was already planning to move his prison operation elsewhere.
My question is this: why not cut the entire budget and close the damn base? It's not like the treaty with Cuba giving the US Navy use of the area was negotiated with a sovereign country (all treaties were made with U.S. puppet regimes before the Cuban Revolution). It seems to me that makes the entire base illegal. From Wikipedia:
By the war's end, the U.S. government had obtained control of all of Cuba from Spain. A perpetual lease for the area around Guantánamo Bay was offered February 23, 1903, from Tomás Estrada Palma, an American citizen, who became the first President of Cuba. The Cuban-American Treaty gave, among other things, the Republic of Cuba ultimate sovereignty over Guantánamo Bay while granting the United States "complete jurisdiction and control" of the area for coaling and naval stations.
A 1934 treaty reaffirming the lease granted Cuba and her trading partners free access through the bay, modified the lease payment from $2,000 in U.S. gold coins per year, to the 1934 equivalent value of $4,085 in U.S. dollars, and made the lease permanent unless both governments agreed to break it or the U.S. abandoned the base property.
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