Fortunately, I suspect most people who eventually find my interview series with attorneys and legal scholars, former detainees and soldiers, journalists and physicians knowledgeable about matters Guantanamo and related (the most recent is with Martha Rayner; the other 35 are referenced at the end of that post), understand that the GTMO and other “terror suspects” that our nation’s government is holding in various guises throughout the world in various judicial-oversight-free-legal-black-holes… are really the ultimate canary in the coal mine. Given Dostoevsky’s famous adage that the degree of civilization of a society may be measured by entering its prisons, we have long since failed that particular measure, as our own prisons get ever more crowded, ever nastier, and ever more defined by matters of race. (Indeed, it should come as no surprise that Sgt. Charles Graner, of Abu Ghraib infamy, was a prison official, in civilian life. But I digress… or do I?) But… we can do worse still!

We fast-forward (or rewind, perhaps) to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba… and then to an appellate court in Washington, D.C. (via Jeralyn): the federal Court of Appeals there has dismissed all pieces of a civil suit brought by four U.K. nationals formerly recipients of our nation’s hospitality at Guantanamo. (And on the sixth anniversary of GTMO’s opening, no less!)

No surprise there, really. By virtue of our nation’s atavistic judicial life tenure system, the integrity of our judiciary is entirely dependent on the integrity of the executive that appoints them and of the senate that rubber-stamps “advises and consents”. And baby, for the last seven years, that’s not even worth thinking about. Before that, other than Bill Clinton’s eight years, we have had Republican governance and hence judicial appointments since 1980… that’s 19 of the last 27 years. Which means that all too often we get judges of the quality and integrity of… well, what we have now. (We had some tempering of extremism under Poppy and Reagan, but all bets have been off these last seven years.) That is to say, these days, the rich and powerful are always right (notice I did not say “the government”, because corporate American can still trounce on the little guy when “the government” occasionally takes his or her side).

You might well ask what we even need courts for under those circumstances, as the rich and powerful would do fine anyway? Good point. But it’s not about them– it’s about us. The rest of us rubes believe we still have a shot, and I suppose, this keeps us pretending we have rule of law and are a free country, etc.

But the current case (if not the entire war on terror gulag archipelago, the domestic spying, the PATRIOT Act, the “dissent = treason” sentiments, etc., etc.) should convince us otherwise: Shafiq Rasul (whom I interviewed here), Asif Iqbal, Rhuhel Ahmed and Jamal Al-Harith brought suit against Don Rumsfeld and minions claiming that their torture in American custody on American controlled territory (both in Afghanistan, and later at GTMO) constituted a violation of American law. Nyet No, says the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, because (1) Guantanamo is Cuba, not the United States, and though our taxpayers pay for the place and Cuba can’t enter it and the Supreme Court has rejected this hogwash already, none of this matters compared to the necessary fiction, (2) it was “reasonably foreseeable” that soldiers would torture prisoners commit grave breaches of Geneva Conventions and acts that we have prosecuted (and occasionally executed) others, including our own soldiers, when they engaged in such barbaric acts, and (3) [a part so troubling, even Janice Rogers Brown had to excuse herself from it], the detainees are simply not “persons” within the meaning of the applicable statutes.

And there we are: Judge Brown was smart enough to recognize the problem with letting that official policy out in public: at least some people in this country recognize the implications of a class of people who are not merely second class citizens, but not people at all. We leave it as an exercise for the reader as to whether she is doing so as an African American, or as a savvy Republican operative who realizes that once the rubes have figured out that the powerful no longer want to be bothered having to temper their dealings with them at all, the game might be up, and genuine pitchforks and torches and barricades may ensue. Or are we that fat and complacent and cowed (not to mention celebrity obsessed) that the powerful need not worry? Let’s just say that’s how they are betting.

This has been “Unpersons (Not Even 3/5)!”