Happy Thanksgiving

Let’s see what we Americans have to give thanks for this year… our Dear Leader now has “the right” to lock any of us up at his sole (AND UNREVIEWABLE) whim… for “our security” you know. Dear Leader can listen in to any of our electronic communications, without one of those annoying warrants… heck, Dear Leader can order any of us to be tortured water-boarded (it’s for our own protection of course)… I could go on, and on (I’ll refrain from discussing, for example, matters fiscal, or environmental, or our overall security and moral standing position in the world). That there are “only” 426 days left in this Administration isn’t as comforting a thought as it might otherwise be, as it seems clear that any of the likely successors to this Administration will find many aspects of the national security state to their liking as well.
Care of our friend Steve Truitt (interviewed here), we get this Boston Globe article discussing the recent GTMO trend that detainees from certain countries are released much, much faster than those from other countries… and Yemen, with a limited and tenuous relationship with the United States, simply doesn’t rate as much as its neighbor, the much more influential Saudi Arabia, which, at this time, has managed to extricate most of its nationals from GTMO (this was also part of the subject matter of our recent interview with Martha Rayner, one of whose clients features prominently in the Globe piece). Just part of that package of arbitrary “real-politik” that passes for American policy.
We were once a more welcoming (not to mention better-behaved) country, all in all, without the current knee-jerk fear of “the other” that has led us to our current overall situation. As an aspirational matter, we might stop to consider, on this day of Thanksgiving, what sort of a place we’d like to be, going forward.