This morning I turned on the radio in order to encourage myself to wake up properly.

It was about 8am and a show called “The War Room with Quinn and Rose” came on, typical talk show fare. “Quinn” talked about several things to do with Barack Obama, his economics policy, the skin coloration of his cabinet, the concept of “moral stature” and other things.

Then he reached for a heated button: Guantanamo Bay. Obama has promised to almost immediately close it, citing moral alarum. Quinn ridiculed this plan, calling the inmates “monsters” and raising utilitarian objections saying that it would be impossible to try them (because they’ve been tortured) and impossible to extradite them as they are banned from their home countries.

This is irrelevant.

They must be put on trial or released. You cannot hold people for protracted periods of time, let alone forever, without trial! Just because they might be found not guilty is not a valid reason to avoid putting them on trial. In the very same show Quinn criticized “the liberals” for avoiding situations where the outcome of an action might be something other than what they desire.

Typical syndicated big-wig talk-show host hypocrisy.

Procedural difficulties cannot override human rights. A right is inalienable ipso facto, rights are not privileges that are granted by government or society, they are natural rights, incumbent upon the definition of human. We may argue about how they arise, some say god, some say evolution, some say the demiurge, others (nonsensically) appeal to consensus.

That is if course what is so very subtly denied in this case, these people are said to be “monsters”, “terrorists”, “enemy combatants”; the tacit implication is that they are not human because they have no decency. They may not have any decency, but humanity is not the same as human-ness.

It seems to me that this is something we don’t want to think about, “we” (society), don’t want to think that these people are the same as us, don’t want to realize the common right and responsibility of human-ness. We want to think “humans can’t be that evil”, all the while committing great evil by assuming guilt and flaunting our prejudice.

Solving the problem of Guantanamo Bay by keeping things as they now are, by suspending human rights is not the answer. “We” excuse our denial of their human-ness by calling them inhuman, but denying the human-ness of humans is inhuman. If humanness is that factor that “we” pretend differentiates “us” from “the terrorist” then are we not already lost?.