Guantánamo

O dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! total eclipse, Without all hope of day.

-John Milton, Sampson Agonistes-

The worst of the worst, scum de la scum; they're bad, evil, terrible people we are holding in Guantánamo, or so we have been told all along. Don't feel bad for the men in cages, we're only torturing them a little bit and after all, if someone has information about a terrible terrorist plot, wouldn't you torture them to find out?

Try to reconcile that official rationale for dehumanizing a group of people picked up or kidnapped under widely varying circumstances from many different places and sometimes only because somebody accused them, or they had a name similar to somebody who might have known somebody; try to reconcile it with the steady trickle of prisoners who after 5 years of duress and investigation have been released as not being dangerous or knowing nothing and being not guilty of doing anything.

Isa Murbati, a 41-year-old father of five who had been a Guantánamo prisoner for more than five years without having been charged with anything, arrived in Bahrain last night. Oops, never mind. He's the sixth and last Bahraini to be released and all the men had been in coveralls and cages since 2002. At lease one had attempted suicide repeatedly. If it had not been for the persistent efforts of the government of Bahrain and King Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa, whose kingdom is considered to be "pro-American" and allows the US to base the Fifth Fleet there, who knows what would have happened to these wretches? Many other prisoners have no place to go because no country will take them. No money, no clothes, no country and most assuredly nearly or fully demented from half a decade of no sleep and waterboarding. The worst of the worst.

The government of Bahrain will seek compensation and perhaps they will succeed. After all they do have leverage, but paying damages would be an admission of having done something wrong and admissions of wrong doing do not escape the iron curtain around the White House any more easily that light will exit any other black hole. I'm sure something will be worked out to save the smiling face of our delusional dictator, but what amount of money can restore a ruined life, a ruined mind?

As far as anyone knows, the amount of valuable information extracted from the torture rooms is about nil. Of course the black hole doesn't emit much light and what it does emit tends to be disinformation or denial, but what can a man who has been in a dog cage for 5 years tell us about? Not much about Osama perhaps, but he can tell us a lot about the United States of America.

Nothing short of impeachment can restore our ruined reputation and bring back the light to the dark and secret nightmare cellars of our nation.

The strange case of Jack McLellan

It's not exactly a case of punishment fitting the crime. As concerns the punishment meted out to Jack McLellan by Superior Court Judge Melvin Sandvig in Los Angeles, on Friday, it's more a matter of there not actually being any crime to punish - outside of McLellan's head, that is. Unlike those we hear about who prey on little girls, McLellan talks about it on television and has operated a web site discussing his obsessions and his methods of getting close to children and photographing them. At one time he posted photographs legally taken of young girls in public places like parks and playgrounds, but he no longer does because of public outrage.

McLellan has no arrest record. There is no evidence that he's ever committed any crimes and he claims that he never will, yet this homeless man, currently living out of his car, was served with a temporary restraining order while on his way to Chicago to make a TV appearance. He is forbidden to get withing 30 feet of anyone under 18; a condition that will make it difficult to be anywhere in public and nearly impossible to enter any commercial establishment. Since stories about him have begun to run in the media recently, mothers of small children have been making frantic complaints that their children have been photographed and the traditional hysteria that defines America is in full bloom. If you're scruffy looking and unshaven and even perhaps if you're not, it can't be a good time to be out on the streets in Southern California with a camera.

Of course this is a temporary order and he will have a chance to challenge it at a hearing set for August 24th, but I have to wonder at preemptive prosecution and thought crimes and their place in this formerly free country where fear and terror and hysteria issue from the media and consumed by the public like water from the tap. I don't want to make too strong a comparison between Salem and Santa Monica, because child molesters really do exist and witches do not, but with more and more localities putting special codes on drivers licenses tagging the owners as sex criminals for the rest of their lives; with more areas forbidding anyone once convicted of unspecified "sex crimes" to own a house or rent an apartment or have an internet account, I have to wonder if we aren't re-creating the medieval concept of outlaw. My disquiet isn't helped by the fact that more things are being labelled as "sex Crimes," including public urination or "mooning" someone out a car window and the perpetrators of such juvenile things can be linked for life with rapists and punished in perpetuity. It would be more than disquieting if such people weren't actually guilty of anything.

Who's got the Habeas?

It's time to stop whimpering about George W. Bush's illegal suspension of Habeas Corpus and do something about it. The Committee now has a slight (10 to 9) Democratic majority and there is hope that some of the Republican members might wish to disassociate themselves with such a clearly illegal action sold to the previous Congress under false pretenses. Indeed Republican Senator Arlen Spector and Chairman Patrick Leahy have co sponsored the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act (S. 185) A vote on a measure to restore Habeas is scheduled for today. It's not too late to e-mail your senators before it's too late to save the Freedom our malignant leadership invokes so cynically.