Gitmo

Wonderful scene in "Band of Brothers" where an outraged Private David Webster shoves a gun into the neck of a German baker who is resisting giving up his daily batch of bread which the GI's are busy hauling off to feed prisoners the 101st Airborne, Easy Company has just discovered at a concentration camp at the outskirts of the town.
"Nicht Nazi!" protests the baker.
"Oh, you're no Nazi. Funny, nobody in Germany is a Nazi!" Webb screams in his face. "You had to know that camp was out there. When the wind shifts, you had to be able to smell it from here, right here in the village!"

The Baker Has To Answer

Of course, what Pvt. Webster was talking about was collective guilt, the guilt of all those townspeople throughout Germany who were looking the other way, careful to not think about what they knew as going on. "How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?" asks the Bard.


But, of course, that's what 300 million Americans do every day when it comes to Gitmo, where men captured in the Middle East and accused of being "terrorists" are deposited, without trial, without charges, without habeus corpus, just thrown in jail and the key thrown away. They can be released when the war on terrorism is over and won, and you know when that will be.


Justifications for Gitmo have been illuminating: These are bad guys, too dangerous to keep in American prisons. They could pass instructions for assassinations from these prisons. They are not entitled to the rights of American prisoners charged with crimes because they are prisoners of war but they are not entitled to the rights of prisoners of war either. It would be too expensive to try them. Their trials could become propaganda. They are so wicked, they do not deserve anything but torture and confinement. They are presumed guilty. If they weren't guilty, they wouldn't be there.


None of these lame excuses from the fearful and those incapable of abstract thought or concrete argument deserve reply. They are, in purest essence the argument of fascism. All that matters is authority and protecting the tender American public from imaginary hobgoblins.




Of course, Mitch McConnell is not the only problem here:  Chuck Schumer in a revealing exercise of political cowardice supported McConnell and all those who sailed with him on this.


We will be judged not by our generosity to the most fortunate among us, but by our actions toward the least fortunate, Franklin Roosevelt observed. The same can be said of the Gitmo star chamber: We will be judged, like that German non Nazi baker by how we looked the other way and ignored this American concentration camp.

Pvt Webster actual and actor: The voice of conscience