Try this on for size: the war on terror is being used to justify all forms of restrictive government controls, from surveillance to union-busting to torture. Lacking any terrorist acts of late, how do we know there are even terrorists? Except that our government keeps scooping them up, putting them in Guantanamo, but it won’t let us see them.

Is Guantanamo really about keeping certain Islamic “illegal combatants” from doing harm? As the overwelming number of detainees are released without charges, it’s hard to believe the authorities cared who they had detained. Perhaps Guantanamo has been serving to perpetuate the myth that such terrorists exist at all.

Arbitrary interments function to terrorize a populace (a reason why they’re violations of international law), but perhaps the US has an additional purpose. What if there is no major league AL Qaeda except for the fictional assemblage at Guantanamo? Perhaps we’ve not been allowed a close look at the captives at Guantanamo lest we detect that there is no rhyme or reason to those detained.

There has been most certainly a group of Islamic Fundamentalists who orchestrated the 1990 attack the WTC, the bombing of the USS Cole, the bombing of the US embassy buildings in Nairobi, and other bombing in Southeast Asia. And on 9/11/2001 a group of Saudi Arabians flew two airplanes into the WTC, although likely with assistance.

But that’s probably about it. With a dozen or so hijackers dying on 9/11, another dozen usual suspects rounded up in Pakistan and Indoneasia, and poster boy Osama traipsing about Afghanistan, there might not have been any more.

A “war on terror” requires enemy terrorists. If there are no further acts of terrorism, how are you going to assert that there are still terrorists out there? Why not incarcerate a bunch of guys who dress like terrorists and take credit for intervening with their dastardly plans? Plus you’ll be asserting that if you have some, there must be more.

But the stories coming out of those released from Guantanamo indicate that US security agencies are simply playing a cruel games with individual world citizens. Why have such detainees been denied access to the world? Isn’t it more appropriate to say that the world is being denied access to the detainees? Maybe it’s the outside world that the US is trying to keep out of Guantanamo. Otherwise people of reason could unravel the fiction of Al Qaeda.