Most people think of me as a fairly Liberal guy, but that’s only partly true. There are certain issues legally, economically, and socially where I am much more Conservative than people give me credit. I do, for example, support the death penalty under the right circumstances, and I do believe in a much more frequent use of the Dangerous Offender status to ensure that dangerous criminals with high recidivism simply don’t get the opportunity to re-offend. But I gotta say, everything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and all the other US “technicality prisons” (as I like to call them) makes me utterly disgusted. My patience for dangerous monsters convicted of horrible deeds is limited; my patience with gathering up large numbers of people without trial and shit-beating them into confessions is even more limited.
I’ve just finished reading the first of three installments of The Guantanamo Memoirs by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. You can find the redacted versions on Slate’s web site (this link will take you to the introduction by Larry Siems, and then link you to the memoirs themselves), and I felt I had to share this with my loving readers.
