Gitmo

Warning: The following discussion is all about National Public Radio and the content discussed therein.

So I was listening to NPR as usual this morning (I try never to miss the Saturday morning lineup of "Car Talk", "Wait wait...Don't Tell Me!", and "What'd ya know?", all of which you can find entries for on Wikipedia by the way. (You're right, Brian. Wikipedia is amazing.))

I was too lazy to change the station after noon, and I began listening to "This American Life" (Instead of explaining the show, I'll insert Stephen's comment from a previous posting... "I disagree with your statement that listening to NPR makes someone boring. This American Life is an invigorating program and generally provides interesting topics for discussion. I shall decree myself adrowsed, so that the twain of us may bandy titherings. Would a boring person say something like that?")

Anyway, to get to the point, the show was all about Guantanamo Bay, specifically two brother comedians from Pakistan who have been held there for 4 years without a hearing. Apparently the two of them wrote some satirical jokes regarding Bill Clinton. Anyway, apparently they were arrested for no other reason than that they were near Tora Bora, Afghanistan, a site of insurgency and suspected hideout of Osama Bin Laden. Basically, the military hauled in a bunch of dirt farmers, brought them to Gitmo, and tortured the hell out of them. When they didn't admit to working for Al Qaeda, they tortured them more. Then, eventually, it must have dawned on them that the people may not be admitting things because there was nothing to admit. Now, after convincing the American public that the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are the worst of the worst, it's just too much of an embarrassment for us to let them go.

You may be wondering, "How can the U.S. hold prisoners without even being charged? Don't we have something called habeas corpus?" Funny you should ask. Actually, Guantanamo Bay serves as a jurisdictional void, technically under the sovereignty of Cuba but completely under U.S. control. This is going through the courts right now because it's complete bullshit, but they still haven't granted hearings to the vast majority of prisoners.

U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!