Haiti and Iraq

Reality, as I like to say, may not be coherent; but it is stringy. The current Bush administration claims that it can do whatever it likes to the prisoners in Guantanamo because technically the base is located on Cuban rather than American soil and neither our constitution nor international law apply to those imprisoned there. This casuistry is not new. It was invented by the first Bush administration to cover the detention and brutalization of Haitian refugees back in 1992. The only difference, if it is indeed a difference, is that the mistreatment of the Haitians has long since been documented in detail whereas we don’t know what’s going on these days in Guantanamo, anymore than we know what horrors are being committed in our name in Iraq.