All the rules that our former Vice President Dick Cheney and President G. W. Bush put into place about how to get around international and U.S. law seem to have been vigorously embraced by President “Change You Can Believe In”.    There was talk when Cheney’s lawyers were force feeding this new regime to our democracy– that you can hold people indefinitely without charges and even torture them, (as long as your lawyers redefined the practices to be lawful and interrogators were properly immunized against prosecution), and also kill people without trial and spy on them without a judicial rubber stamp.  Oh, and also invade countries because you honestly believe they might attack you some day, whether they have the means to do so at the moment or not.

I recall the mouse-like debates at the time– “but, if we give these powers to this Unitary Executive, supremely wise and prudent though he is, what about the next one?  Would we want Hillary Clinton (the presumptive next president at the time) to be able to decide who is an enemy combatant, who to kill by drone, which civil liberties to suspend and which countries we can invade without an actual causus belli?”   The answer, five years after an Executive Order closed down the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, is still “NO!”

There were once more than 800 detainees, held in this legal limbo on a corner of Cuba.  These prisoners, many turned in for generous American reward money, were famously called “the worst of the worst”.  Quietly more than 600 of these merciless terrorists have been released, not charged with anything, or after a careful investigation of the facts reveals one as, say, an Afghan pediatrician, turned in for the reward money.  “Go back to your clinic, doctor, and continue treating children.  And sorry about the two or three years of what some critical people might cavil and call ‘torture’.  Have a nice day, doctor.  And by the way, have your lawyer read our new laws carefully before you spend any money trying to sue us.  He’ll tell you we’re bulletproof, and he’ll be 100% correct.  Have a very nice day, and again, sorry we never changed your towels or bedding, during those times when you had a bed.”

At last count there are 166 men left in Guantanamo, 86 of whom have already been cleared by our intelligence service for release.  You may recall that President Obama, in one of his first official acts, closed that shameful “detention center” in January 2008.   Not that it had any real world effect on the actual detention center.  Many of those prisoners, long denied habeus corpus (the ancient right to know what you’re accused of and what jeopardy you face before they lock you up) are now on a mass hunger strike– 100 of them, in fact.  You won’t see much of this on the news.  Face it, it’s embarrassing, and horrible.  Why publicize something so tawdry?   It will certainly not help anyone sell anything.   We don’t talk about 250,000 Indian farmer suicides in the last decade because Monsanto took their farms, why mention 166 people, some of whom may actually have connections to terrorism?

Because America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, and has long been famous for its spirit of fair play, the more than twenty  hunger strikers in danger of death will not be allowed to starve themselves to death.  They are taken out of their cells by force, if necessary (and one suspects it often is necessary, unfortunately, as people desperate enough to go on a hunger strike will often not be the most cooperative or sensible people) strapped into a chair and have a feeding tube forced down their nostril into their alimentary canal (or further down, I’m not a doctor, what do I know about forced feeding?) so that nutrients can be forced into their bodies.  

You see, we value human life, we do.  Some life we value a lot more, and a monetary value can be, and is, assigned to each life, but we find all life precious.  Even the lives of those who may, quite possibly, hate our freedoms, even after more than a decade of forced detention, humiliation, rough-stuff, and, in maybe three cases we know of, enhanced interrogation that may have arguably crossed the line and been near the border of torture as traditionally defined, even those lives are precious.  And we will not let them die no matter how passionately they might beg for that right.