Dahlia Lithwick, who's one of the most perceptive and certainly the most entertaining writers about the Supreme Court, has a deadly serious essay on Slate that eveyone should read. The questions it raises are simple: Does Guantanamo Bay undermine America's values? http://www.slate.com/id/2136422/ This question has been asked before and the negative response usually goes along the lines of "these are the worst of the worst, people dedicated to destroying the United States." Lithwick surveys the evidence: "We are casually destroying their lives." She lists the ways that most got there, high bounties paid to the northern alliance, the imprisonment of people injured in American bombing, having lived with Taliban members. One study estimates that 86 percent of the people there were turned over to the US by the northern alliance or pakistan army in the time of extremely high bounties. Once at Guantanamo, they are guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, subject to interrogations where their words are twisted to justify their detention. Lithwick concludes that we have perfected the systems that Kafka imagined early in the twentieth century. People are held by a government that doesn't recognize that they exist as individuals, that keeps them in a place that doesn't exist within a country, that denies them the ability to be heard. As she says... My questions... To those who would still support holding people at Guantanamo Bay, how do you justify this treatment? How do you make it consistent with this nation's dedication to granting the individual rights both to protect himself from state power and to answer accusations against him? How is this American? To those who oppose this treatment... What is to be done?
The "problem" with Gitmo, as a human rights issue here, is that the revelations have dribbled out slowly over time. If you follow the issue, or happen to catch an article that is a summary article, and you see the whole picture, it's pretty damning. But there's been no single blockbuster revelation. And so it sits there, distracting our gvt. and undermining our values and our ability to project moral clarity in the war on terrorists.