DAMN YOU WORD LIMIT!

So I had this quasi-brillant Letter to the Editor that I was all ready to send to the local papers here in Chicago, until the ACLU told me (not directly - via a mass email) that most papers will not publish anything over 250 words and that most people won't read the long letters. So ::sigh:: I hacked my beautiful 650-word essay almost in half. But I'll be darnedtoheck if I don't say everything I want to say somewhere.

And really, this is a much better forum, as I can put all my hotlinks back in, so people don't think I'm making this stuff up.

Letter to the Editor: The director's cut

In discussions about what to do with the men currently held in Guantanamo Bay, people often forget two important facts: (1) many of them have already been cleared of any wrong doing and--in our own government’s words--were not and are not a threat, and (2) the few men who are a threat can indeed be handled in our federal prison system.

Rather than focus on these facts and on the task at hand, i.e. ending an unjust practice, we squabble about recidivism rates and whether or not cities that house former Gitmo inmates would be the focus of future terrorist attacks. First off, many including CNN and law experts seriously doubt the recidivism statistics, as they have traditionally been wrong and have included men who wrote op-ed pieces or attended documentary film fests as “returning to the fight.” And housing accused terrorists hasn't gotten Cuba blown up. Once again, our leaders appear to be manipulating numbers to strengthen their weak arguments, and various shock-jocks are exploiting fear and prejudice to glean higher ratings.

But what we are truly missing here is that we have become bound by fear. We are constantly looking over our shoulders, fearful of all of “them.” We must break out of this bondage and not be so afraid of the actions of one or two men that we end up denying the rights and freedoms of hundreds.

For years, many prisoners have languished in confinement, despite having been cleared. Take for instance the seventeen Uighurs (WEE-gurz) who were cleared in 2004 but are still in Cuba because (i) China, their home country, is likely to oppress them if they go back, (ii) we won’t take them, and (iii) China is threatening other countries that might be willing to take them. And there are others as well, other men and boys who have lost years of their lives, who may never see their families or homes again, and who have done little if anything deserving of imprisonment. Surely, keeping the innocent in prison to avoid the possibility that someone might someday do something we don’t like is no more than throwing the baby out with the bath water, or more accurately burning the baby to boil the bath water.

And as for the argument that we cannot house those who do pose a threat to us – patently false. The USA has the largest prison system in the industrialized world. We have over 2,000,000 people currently in the prison system, almost 0.7% of our population. If anything, we should be arguing that we can’t take them because we don’t have room not because they’re too dangerous. Our justice system, although by no means perfect, has been able to deal with homegrown and international terrorists. Our prisons currently house Jose Padilla, Zacarias Moussaoui, Theodore Kaczynski, and Terry Nichols all in the same Colorado prison. So why are we so opposed to taking in a few more? What are truly afraid of?

Perhaps we are not ready to do the soul-searching necessary to understand what has happened to our country since September 2001, but our inability to confront mistakes and fears cannot come at the expense of justice. Other nations are able and willing to help absorb the innocent, but we must take the lead on this. We had the “moral authority” to take the men to Cuba. Now we must find the moral strength to do what is right. For those who need to remain in prison, we have plenty of concrete for them. For those who need to be freed, we have a compassionate and thriving culture that can absorb them. If we are to be able to look the world in the face and ask them to do their part to help, we must be willing to do our part too.

Sincerely,
Me