Forever prisoners
by digby
Alex Wagner on NOW featured a truly disturbing story about Guantanamo yesterday that I think got lost in all the Obamacare brouhaha.
That creepy footage of Gitmo in which the “Forever Prisoner” cries out for help just makes my skin crawl. (A Forever Prisoner is someone they have decided must be kept forever without trial because they “scare us” — even though we cannot prove they committed a crime.) You cannot call yourself a civilized country if you do such a thing. Notice that Alex Wagner brings up the apparently irrelevant idea that America should not be holding people indefinitely without trial (much less in SuperMax prisons, which Robert Gibbs blandly describes as “worse than hell” even as he apparently thinks putting these prisoners there forever would be some kind of solution) and the response is pretty much “yeah, yeah, yeah, moral legal blah, blah, blah.”
Our prison system is something out of the third world as it is. But normalizing the idea that we can lock up people forever who we think are “scary” even though we cannot try them is basically rendering the principles that inspired our constitution moot. It’s just appalling.
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