Monday was the ninth anniversary of the first captives arriving at the Guantanamo Bay gulag. It is, next to slavery and Japanese-American internment, the most shameful chapter in America's checkered civil rights history. While the nation's media is obsessed with the mass shooting at Tucson that killed six, including a federal judge and a nine year old girl, and severely wounded a member of Congress, the 173 men imprisoned for suspicion of terrorism continues indefinitely midst a strange limbo of denial and partisan wrangling.
Polticos like to talk a lot about the "rule of law", but when the subject of trying these men in courts of law or releasing them, they run for the cover of popular rhetoric about fighting terrorism. None of the allegations against the captives has seen the light of day, let alone
their veracity tested in a US courtroom. Eighty-nine of the remaining captives have already been
administratively cleared for release. Forty-four promised to close down Guantanamo, yet nine years later it is still open. The political barriers to closure are getting higher. He reluctantly
signed a war funding measure that prohibits the administration using appropriated funds to bring detainees onto US soil for trial or to send them to third countries.
The nation also has a bad case of adult attention deficit concerning the president who tortured. Despite his public admission that he approved the use of torture, Forty-three does not face any concerted prosecution or even investigation of serious, confessed breaches of international and domestic criminal law despite legal obligations to do so, including the current President's oath of office. The former government lawyers who wrote the legal memos justifying the use of torture are also enjoying impunity for their aiding and abetting of a war crime. And they remain professionally employed. Any talk in America either from the current President or his minions about "the rule of law" is just that--talk.
