Guantanamo Bay and the Big Shitball

"...the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore."

-from the Supreme Court decision
to allow for habeas corpus hearings
for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay
(pp.56-57)

So habeas has returned to Gitmo. Like swallows to Capistrano, it is inevitable that as sense and law rotate back to their proper planetary positions, they eclipse fear's fury. The downside? It's only a chink in armor that's seven years' thick with piled bodies and reckless leadership, guarded by secrets as sticky to get through as electrified flypaper.

OH MY GOD! I hope whomever we choose for our new leaders have the sense to realize that Gitmo and torture and waterboarding and wiretapping are all part of the same petrifying, putrid shitball as the war in Iraq! It may seem like the typical multi-limbed monster that any government at war would have to deal with, but this is no fucking octopus; it's a goddamn plutoid!

So how do we fix it? Do we land some NASA rover on it to break off a piece at a time and hope that we find the secret formula to destroy it before the piece we broke off grows back, even more stubborn and resistant to reason?

Do we blow the whole mess up, pull out of Iraq, close Guantanamo, free the rendered innocent, indict our war criminals and let the burning meteorite chips fall where they may, even if it's back on us?

The way I like of clearing away this dangerous rock is to drill deep inside it, to the corrupted U.S. foreign policy that is at its core. If we repair our relationship with the world from the inside out, maybe the rest of the big hunk of goppy poo will just die and rot, then dry up and blow away. To me, that is the most elegant solution, though as such, it requires the steady hand of a skilled politician that works with surgical precision, and doesn't just go in there with a chainsaw and an earthmover.

Hacking away at something until it appears to be dead would be bad at so many levels. It would be messy, to be sure, not knowing for certain whether or not we'd slain the beast or just made it angrier. Worse still, another bad leader's cavalier carelessness might start with a moment of exultation (a la "Mission Accomplished") but as the cheers and applause began to die down, a small hiss would penetrate the din, and we would quickly devolve to the dreaded realization that we were getting sucked into oblivion through the black hole of annihilation that we created for ourselves when we chose who we wanted to fight for us. Oh, shit.

I do hope we are wise enough this time to choose properly.

-PBG