"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets" said Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris to reporters. "They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."
If we have no other evidence for the intrinsic evil of such men as are being held incommunicado and without charges in wire cages, we are now given the fact that they were willing do die rather than to face living the rest of their lives under intolerable conditions. One can only wonder whether the 460 Guantanamo prisoners are better off than the unknown number of men and boys grabbed from who knows what street in who knows what country for who knows what reason and sent off to be beaten, tortured and terrorized in who knows what dungeon in some Central Asiatic hell of a country. If there is anything asymmetric to be seen, it is the might and power of the United States Vs. some guy in a cage.
The perception of symmetry of course is subjective. An American willing to die rather than reveal our positions to an enemy would be a hero and to attempt escape from Colditz was a duty, but the massive asymmetry between the way we treated the men who beheaded hundreds of thousands, murdered tens of millions and bayoneted babies and the way we treat those who may or may not have done anything more than having been seen talking to the wrong person is stunning. Men like Ishi Shiro who spread anthrax, plague and smallpox over uncountable women and children and who conducted unspeakable medical experiments on innocents were set free after WW II. The slaughter of innocents hardly bothers us, but the suicide of a prisoner? The nerve of such people.
To what low have we sunk if we can as easily dehumanize others, enemy or otherwise to the point where we can beat them to death and yet see their suicide as an act of war, a sinister plot against us, a publicity stunt? How depraved are we if we can call ourselves the last best hope of the world while acting like the greatest monsters of history? How, if we foam at the mouth about Godless Liberals and break the legs of teenagers do we call ourselves human?
How ironic is it that millions of us obsess about the apocalypse and Rapture and the coming of the beast, when we are in fact the Beast?
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6 comments:
That one blows my mind. Somehow the US is the victim of three guys who committed suicide? Orwell must be rolling in his grave.
It's an example of how we manage to continue this war metaphor in spite of all hell. Everyone's at war with us, everything is an act of war - and all the time we're not at war; we're occupying a nation we defeated and who doesn't want us there and doesn't like us or what we're doing.
We kill children and it's because we're at war - war has become it's own excuse and its own justification.
The supposed Liberal Media would be all over this one, wouldn't ya think?
You have to pinch yourself every now and then, and ask yourself "is this really happening or is it a bad dream?"
Just because it's a bad dream doesn't mean it's not really happening.
I have mixed feelings on this one...
The idea of secret prisons is obviously anti-american... But holding battle-field types (i.e. - folks caught fighting our forces) in a prison camp -- indefinitely -- is ok with me.
The problem here is we have no accountability -- no one knows who most of these people are. That's gotta change. Unless you can say, unequivocally, that everyone was captured on the battlefield with a AK in their hands, they don't belong in a military prison.
To me it isn't the existence of prison camps, but the fact that we don't think of them as places for prisoners of war who are to be treated with the same standards we have upheld for a century. The Geneva conventions and nearly any other standard of civilized behavior have been tossed out. We are not fighting uniformed troops and yet we give no one we capture the chance to be exonerated - rather we torture them untill they die or simply confess to something just so that the torture will stop.
That we don't care condemns us. That we are really no better than those we imprison, makes what might have been seen as a moral struggle into a struggle of beasts.
This is no longer the America we pretended to be. It's an America with no feelings, no morals, no scruples and a rage to win.
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