The Shame of Guantanamo Belongs to All of Us...

I've been thinking a lot the last couple of days about the bleeding wound that is Guantanamo Bay prison - and let's be clear; it's a prison and not some euphemism like "detention center" - and the systematic outrage that led to its existence in the first place.  It is the sorry and sad result of multiple flagrant violations of our principles as a nation and the rule of law that we should all cling to like grim death in this second decade of the 21st century if we want our nation to come out the other end of this 100 years familiar to us at all.  Make no mistke; it is a stain on the national character that won't easily be removed.  Its existence is no longer the result of George the Dull and his half-mad cabal of deep thinkers, chicken-hawks and bed wetters; it is now a bipartisan embarrassment that we as citizen continue to enable by our "Who gives a shit, they're foreigners" nonchalance. 

There are currently roughly 90 completely innocent men rotting there - men who have been deemed to be nothing more than unlucky - and we don't have the collective balls to say, "You're not pulling this shit if I have anything to do with it..." - instead we turn away, our heads full of paranoid, pseudo-patriotic nonsense and hope it somehow goes away.  In the face of the idiocy on display night after night during republican candidates' debates - where the issue of the day often can be distilled as, who is the most righteously moral - we allow the superficial and pompous display to pass for a stand on principle and do nothing about "indefinite detention" of the innocent becoming enshrined as the law of the land.  It's a pathetic indictment of all of us.