Structure and Cosmetics

" The sad coda to the whole U.S. misadventure at Guantanamo is that we built a prison there for the people who most terrify us and have used it to go after people who didn't much matter. We built it to hold people too dangerous to be brought stateside, then used it to warehouse people too embarrassing to let go.

The whole object of Guantanamo was to create a legal black hole, a place where we could make up the law as we went along. But that doesn't quite capture the secondary tragedy of the place: Over time, it's also become a memory hole, a place into which America has been allowed to banish all the evidence of a lawless, embarrassing, hysterical past."

- Dahlia Lithwick, The Memory Hole: The real tragedy of the Omar Khadr trial.

Although the article doesn't go far into the human rights issues that surround Guantanamo Bay, and Khadr's imprisonment, this closing passage of the article is what hits the right notes with me.