Kafkaesque

“Guilt is always without doubt.”

--Franz Kafka, “The Penal Colony”

People who have never read Franz Kafka, and I’m one of them except for two short stories, have an almost instinctive understanding of the adjective “Kafkaesque.” It’s a world of menace, of bureaucratic cruelties, a surreal universe in which events happen without reason, but with malice.

On Monday, April 25, the New York Times published three pages of selected documents relating to Guantanamo.  Guantanamo is Kafkaesque.  Prisoners are held for the flimsiest of reasons, Prisoners were tortured at whim, prisoners are kept for years without trial.  Who gets released and who remains seems to be determined more by chance than any rational reason. 

President Obama promised to end this mess, but Congress has passed legislation forbidding the detainees from being brought to trial in the U.S.  Military tribunals will be starting, but much of the evidence is inadmissible because it was obtained after torture.  

I am hoping that at some point in our history we will look back on Guantanamo the way we look at the Trail of Tears or the Japanese internment camps.  The very fact that the U.S. controls a piece of Cuba is a remnant of an imperial past.  The way we have handled the prisoners at Guantanamo is a stain on the United States.  The way Congress has handled it makes the stain larger.  What a travesty.  Guantanamo flies in the face of everything this country is supposed to stand for.  I am ashamed of it.