Swallowing the Whale: The Guantanamo Confessions

My guess is that the American public would love to see the five Guantanamo confessors executed. End the legal games, for all their sham. Grant the accused their wish. The public would then be playing its part in the farce, maybe as the closest thing to a victim in the triangle. It was victimized first by the attacks, then by the federal government’s transformation of American society into a fearful fortress within its borders, a lashing one beyond them (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan). Complicit, too, by swallowing whole the fiction that freedom and justice can be preserved by their obliteration where, when and regarding whom the president decides they must be obliterated.

To accept these five men’s confessions, and the Pentagon’s ridiculous reasoning that it’s a plea like any other, would be the ultimate act of swallowing the lie. But isn’t that what made the last seven years so successful for Osama bin Laden? What enabled al-Qaida to make a playground of American fears and a garrison of American freedoms? In the Old Testament, the whale swallowed Jonah. In the “war on terror,” the American public swallowed the whale.

Read my full take, "Confessions of Guantanamo Detainees: Punishment or Martyrdom?"