Much, much too late

As everyone knows by now, the Supreme Court finally got around this past week to telling the administration "hey, you can't just torture prisoners indefinitely ... at some point you have to, you know, actually provide a reason for imprisoning them."

Dear leader declared from Italy that while he might disagree with the decision he would abide by it. I am not sure why he should all of a sudden feel bound to abide by our Constitution, a flimsy piece of paper has not stopped him before. Of course, in the same set of comments where he graciously agreed he might be bound by the ruling he also suggested his administration would immediately start looking for ways to legislate around it.

I'd admire his stick-to-it attitude much more if it was dedicated to something like a reasonable national health care policy, a responsible approach to resolving issues along our border with Mexico, lowering the national debt or developing a coherent energy policy rather than finding excuses to detain people indefinitely so we can torture them whenever it suits our whim.

Even if dear leader goes against form and does actually obey the Court's decision, it's too late, the damage has been done.

Without question some number of the prisoners are bad, evil individuals who deserve to be locked away for life. However, it's also indisputable some number are guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Most fall somewhere in between. One question would be should we resort to torture even with the "worst of the worst" (answer: no, we should be better than that), and another has been how many even merit that appellation. The administration has in the past claimed all of them do, that it has infallibly managed to send only those guilty of the worst crimes, or, at least, planning to commit the worst forms of misdeeds, to Guantanamo.

Of course, this has been provably wrong for some time, as some number of detainees have already been determined to not be guilty of what they were accused of and released ... generally after spending months or years in a prison where they were regularly abused.

McClatchy Newspapers published the first part of what will be a five-part series today detailing the findings of its eight-month investigation into the prisoners at Guantanamo. McClatchy has been, throughout, the best source of truly investigative reporting regarding the war and its motives, and this piece is yet another must-read. As it makes clear, administration officials have known for years that many, perhaps most, of the prisoners kept in Guantanamo had no reason to be there and were not sources of operational intelligence. However, in an administration which could not bring itself to admitting it was anything less than infallible, releasing these prisoners, or even moving them to another location where they might be treated humanely, was never an option to consider.

Instead, we set up a system where individuals have been held for reasons they were not told based on evidence they could not see provided by individuals they could not know about. Kafka would be so proud.

Darth Scalia has already predicted this ruling will lead to more deaths. Of course, this claim will never be able to be proven either way. What is provable is our nation has resorted to torturing innocent individuals. We have violated nearly every human right imaginable, all purportedly for the "best" of reasons.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hopefully this latest ruling will help take their first steps down the road out of the abyss.