Asymmetrical Injustice: Gitmo Suicides

The Guantanamo suicides are “appalling,” to use a word favored by the editorialists, only up to a point. They are appalling in what they say about the blight on justice that is Gitmo itself. They are appalling in what they say about the Bush administration’s descent where once only the likes of Soviet and East German and Albanian and Chinese governments descended. They are appalling in what they say about America’s other branches of government—Congress, the courts—for their complicity in Guantanamo, and therefore in the suicides. Congress could at any point since January 2002, when Gitmo became the black hole it is, have legislated against it, clearly and unequivocally. It could have said: The United States does not engage in extra-judicial punishment and kangaroo tribuna`ls. It could have said top the Bush administration: Not over the Constitution’s dead body. Of course it didn’t, conceding that the Constitution since 2001 might as well have been a dead body. It was left up to the courts. They turned it into a game of punts. Chance after chance, with that minor exception in 2004, when the Supreme Court applied a few conditions that the administration quickly evaded, the courts deferred to the Sovietization of American justice. Appalling, all that, but the suicides in and of themselves are not appalling. They are the one liberating action these men have chosen to make, the one act they could perform entirely of their own free will in defiance of the dungeon they were forced into. Read the rest...