Guantanamo ... why do I feel guilty?
In an article some time back in the International Herald Tribune, 'Isolation and Despair in a Legal Limbo', Charles Levendosky chose a strictly legalistic way to reflect what could be a sense of national guilt over the treatment we have accorded the prisoners at Guantanamo. I suspect I'm not alone in sharing Levendosky's increasing discomfort with this situation. The arguement ought to based not just on legal specifics, it ought to reflect our fundamental belief in the philosophical constants that inform the law and which we must not abandon in this war against terror -- the values of liberal democracy that we espouse and were first articulated not by a middle eastern religion of whatever ilk, but by Aristotle, the most dispassionate father of our civilisation. It boils down to this: those we have incarcerated at Guantanamo deserve some sort of due process -- military probably -- as prisoners of war. We can argue whether they merit this treatment in our righteous anger, but it is appropriate for us, as citizens of a democracy, that they are given access to the levers of its legal system. This is, after all, what we're defending. If it doesn't work now, if we don't have the moral courage to employ it in this awful, extraordinary time, are we not undermining the very thing we are defending?