Our politicians and Press Poodles and everybody else showing off a talent for farting thru their mouths have all been telling us for quite a while that they don't want those rotten terrorists at Gitmo to be brought into this country because they'll stink up the joint - or some such nonsense.
Here's the thing. I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them. If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.
Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.
We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.
BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).
So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.
And the kicker - we knew it was wrong. All of us. We knew it. It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves. We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.
Can we stop pretending now?
Here's the thing. I think we know now why we can't just close Gitmo and bring 'em here - it's because we tortured them. If we put these guys into the regular channels of either our civilian justice system or the military justice system, we lose 'em.
Nothing we have against them can be used in court now because we fucking tortured them.
We completely lost our shit after 9/11. We went more than a little looney, and we did all these really lousy things to people.
BTW - not to put us on the couch too much here, but we made the transition from Andy Hardy to Vlad The Impaler in one big fuckin' hurry; fast enough to make me think maybe we weren't really making this huge change so much as we were just kinda coming out of the closet(?).
So anyway, when we began to understand just how fucked up it was that we were doing all this really bad shit, we went into the standard CYA mode that happens every god dammed time we allow too few people to hold too much power, and let 'em do their thing without any way to keep an eye on 'em.
And the kicker - we knew it was wrong. All of us. We knew it. It's wrong to torture people. And it was wrong to change the law in order to help us pretend we were still the good guys just trying to protect our sweet innocent little ol' American selves. We knew it was wrong and we did it anyway.
Can we stop pretending now?
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