It would be a real favor to yourself and America if you would check out this week’s episode of This American Life, “Habeas Schmabeas.” It includes some powerful interviews of two prisoners in the U.S.’s “prisoner of war” camp in Guantanamo Bay. Hearing the stories of real people is such a vital thing, because it pulls us from the general to the particular: we can much more easily dismiss the violation of rights as a concept than we can the violation of the humanity of this specific human being. The whole point of this episode is that we are more prone to believe the propaganda that the U.S. is holding “dangerous enemy combatants” if we treat them as a whole rather than listening to their individual stories. This episode, then, spells out what is so unacceptable about witholding trial and power of attorney to these people. When treated as a whole, it’s as though they have no existence apart from the name that is given them: “enemy combattant.” And it is of course we who will name them, we who will use them for our purposes. We need the enemy, we need a scapegoat. And that’s what they will be if we deny them their story.
Here is the caption from the website:
“The right of habeas corpus has been a part of our country’s legal tradition longer than we’ve actually been a country. But the War on Terror has nixed many of the rules we used to think of as fundamental. At Guantanamo Bay, our government initially claimed that prisoners should not be covered by habeas—or even by the Geneva Conventions—because they’re the most fearsome enemies we have. But is that true? Is it a camp full of terrorists, or a camp full of our mistakes? An updated version of our Peabody Award-winning episode.”
