The military indefinite detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is now 10 years old with no end in sight. I could go on about the lack of habeas corpus. All the things wrong with the proposition that we should trust our presidents to be fair judge and jury for the hundreds of people who have been imprisoned there with almost no accountability. The fact that out of 779 past and present prisoners, the military courts have only been able to convict three of any crime (three more have accepted plea deals), even under the unfair rules of said military courts: one chauffeur, one videographer, and one Australian wanna-be Islamist mercenary who was too uneducated to get into the Australian military. The journalists detained. All the torture, murders and/or suicides that have occurred there. The fact that bounty hunters rounded up many of the prisoners for payment from the US military to be sent to Guantanamo with no evidence against them. I could tell you about the willing collusion of American doctors and psychologists to carry out torture and harm on detainees.
But these are all-too unsurprising facts. They do not waterboard our conscience, so to speak, as they would have 11 years ago. And this is the importance of such a despicable anniversary. It marks the beginning of a dirtying of our culture’s moral compass and set of legal values. It delineates the start of an era of wild executive global power, of Abu Ghraib, of CIA blacksites, of countless drone strikes, of military units that keep body parts as war souvenirs, of Americans urinating on people they just killed.
Those marines did not just urinate on dead Afghans, they urinated on their own souls, they urinated on all of our souls, for we have largely stood silent to our government’s waging of unending war and unaccountable detention.
The word Terrorist is both meaningless and wildly powerful because it can apply to any enemy or patsy, real or imagined, with virtually zero prerequisites. But powerful because the word has been used to dismantle our Constitution and our legal values. It has justified unprecedented wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in both time and treasure. It has justified the assassination and indefinite detention of US citizens. It has justified the detention and torture of people of many nationalities all over the world. It has justified the codification and acceptance of an opaque and practically omnipotent executive branch.
Our collective silence and hesitancy on the renditions, tortures, mutilations and detentions is a sign of our ignorance – willful and by our mass media – and our moral failure. This is not a lecture. I am every bit as guilty as you. My soul is every bit as sullied as yours when I pay federal taxes to support this apparatus. I refuse to watch the video of the Marines peeing on warm cadavers because I cannot handle what is done in the name of my security. I too turn a blind eye.
But on this anniversary, let’s try to face the world we now live in. Let’s look at these pictures. Let’s try to reclaim our souls.
DISTURBING IMAGES BELOW
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Very good, Jeff, and yes, very disturbing.