So, the problem isn't really one of "closing Guantanamo". The problem is, in reality, that the Bush Administration has used strappado against our Constitution, that she has been hung up by her wrists, left turning in the wind and in plain sight for the world to see. No matter the carefully choreographed hearings that well-meaning House members attend with their best C-SPAN face, the American people know it. The world knows it. The most beautiful legal structure ever to describe and to prescribe the welfare of a civil society the world has ever seen has been kidnapped, tortured and hung. Feet off the ground, once, and for years now.
Any reasonable person should have understood, when they saw the footage of the prisoners "captured" in Afghanistan, flown to Cuba and marched into Gitmo hooded and shackled, our government was very far down the road into abusing human rights and human bodies. Rumsfeld called these random souls sold to us by bounty hunters "the worst of the worst". That was a lie.
The flight from Afghanistan to Gitmo was a rendition flight and it was done in plain sight. We were all complicit from the moment the cable channels aired that film. We can never say we didn't know what was happening to theses teachers and photographers and janitors and children and grandfathers and tourists bought with our tax money for the Pentagon's terror parade. The Bush government made sure we all saw it. They inoculated themselves by implicating the public as the crime was in progress.
The remaining 275 Guantanamo detainees will continue to be abused in confinement until George W. Bush is safely out of office and so, beyond prosecution. That's also on all our heads. And on the heads of every Congressional committee that has played and replayed their stale surprise and outrage where human decency and due diligence was needed to redress these ongoing war crimes. It may just be more tidy for this Congress to wait until the Democrats get a real working majority before they truly deal with the lost souls in the Guantanamo prison camp. Political neatness trumping human rights – is that the new American M.O?
Gentlemen and gentle ladies, human rights organizations have been protesting these detentions since 2002. Your feigned surprise in the year 2008 in the absence of reparative action is a failure to execute your oath of office so immense as to be beyond describing in the English language, in any language for that matter. If you expect that your constituencies will be satisfied with performance art instead of job performance, you are very much mistaken.
We're cutting the Constitution down from where you have left her swinging, feet in the air. We're going to resuscitate, to take care of her. We're going to make sure that she is released into more diligent hands than yours. And we will work to make sure the innocent people you have abandoned for years in that hellhole get justice. Make no mistake, we can only surmise our own turn at injustice, abuse and abandonment at your hands is next. And we will not have that.
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