The black hole of Guantanamo
by digby
When killing becomes routine, I guess they feel the need to desecrate. There's nothing particularly new in this --- except the laws against it.
That's just awful. That it comes on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo makes it all the worse.
Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent piece up about that tragic decision and the legal fallout, which contains many insights, this one especially:
The paradox of Guantanamo has always been that it’s been invisible to so many Americans, and yet the only thing the rest of the world sees. The whole point of the prison camp there was to create a legal black hole. We’ve fished our wish: The world sees only blackness; we see only a hole.
That’s always been the challenge of Guantanamo: making it seem real to Americans who have tended to think of the Cuban camp as the potted palm in the war on terror. And it’s very difficult to get exercised over a potted palm.
I suspect that is largely because Americans live in a country with nearly 2 million people behind bars, many of them innocent, all of them subject to a system so byzantine and unfairly applied that "justice" has become a remote abstraction. We have jails everywhere, for everything, from the local hoosegow to country lock-ups to state prisons, federal penitentiaries and military brigs. Oh, plus the various holding facilities, psychiatric lock-ups and juvenile and immigration detention centers.
We are a nation of prisons. I just don't think most Americans find it all that remarkable that a particular group of prisoners are caught in some kind of legal limbo. It happens every day to one extent or another. I'm not excusing it --- it's a blight on our country and we should all be ashamed. But I think that's why Guantanamo is just another a potted palm. Americans can't see the palm forest for the trees.
Just as those marines are so used to killing that they can't see they've lost their humanity, the American public is so used to innocent people in prison that they can't get worked up about a bunch of innocent foreigners caught in a Catch-22. We are uncivilized. The question is if we're getting worse or if we've always been this bad.
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