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Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
Hopefully we won't because that's another step on the road we're going down already. The road to government shooting any of us at any time for any reason or no reason at all.
The rule of law is our friend, and our best defense against the capriciousness of government.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Stated more articulately, i miss the former priority in the US of becoming more egalitarian. In our country's beginning slavery was legal. In the 50s we experimented on the mentally disabled and ill. In the 60s (and before obviously) we persecuted minorities for trying to exercise their rights. In the 60s-70s we drafted and sent people to their deaths in war without allowing them the right to vote (draft age was 18, voting age was 21). These things aren't done anymore, and certainly not on an institutionalized scale. These things are now not acceptable. This is a good thing. As a nation, we have a history of eventually responding to dissent with corrective action (getting better). We are departing from that history and descending into barbarism in our dealings with a threat that does not merit it.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
Innocent? By this article's own admission they were "getting paramilitary training in Afghanistan" before 9/11 ... what exactly do you think they were doing there, learning to follow in Mother Teresa's footsteps? These aren't just some wonderfully delightful peaceful people who happened to be sitting around singing Kumbaya in the wrong place when they were arrested.