news from camp x-ray

...apparently about 4% of the caged birds are singing foully at their cagers:

I just got a late-night phone call from sno-dog down in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he's been playing jail guard for the Taliban/Al Qaeda/etc. Assurance upon assurance I received from him that he's been acting sufficiently ethically, and that, regarding the current buzz in the US media on the prisoner's treatment, "they are not getting any undeserved punishment." Perhaps that quote, taken out of context, misrepresents what he was saying, but he was purposely vague, and he left much to my own interpretation or imagination. I do the same for you.

I don't have the answers, just like everyone else. I cringe when I think of what's most likely going on in Afghanistan, but it's easier to excuse what's most likely going on in Cuba. It's my understanding that the prisoners there are signed, sealed, delivered evildoers, so it's excusable on a "you got what was coming to you" level. It gets hazy, however, in consideration of foot soldiers in another army, (and then certainly less hazy, tho on the other end of the spectrum in consideration of civilians.) I certainly can't see international scale right-from-wrong at my low rung of the information food chain - neither can you. But our country's leaders say "go and fight for us." Aren't we the same villainous despots to the opposing side as they are to us?

The product-of-one's-environment issue is a tricky one. Just less tricky when you're the guy that says, "yes, you should go fly a plane into a building and kill thousands of people."

I'm just glad I'm not there. Glad that I don't have to make those decisions, or be engaged in a moral struggle where the opposite side is fought with morals too. Glad that I don't have to harden myself, blind myself to rid myself of that struggle.

sweet dreams