"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

~Lewis Carroll



Several of the prisoners being illegally held at Gitmo hanged themselves. There have been numerous suicide attempts, but these prisoners were the first to succeed. The U.S. response? BBC reports that, "the camp commander, Rear Adm Harris said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.

'They are smart. They are creative, they are committed,' he said.

'They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.'"

That's right. We imprisoned them illegally and were holding them indefinitely and they hung themselves as "an act of asymmetrical [whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean in this context -- most of us could figure out who would be David and who would be Goliath in this pairing] warfare . . . against us."

The Bush junta, as we all know, is fond of creating their own reality. Black is white, up is down, freedom is slavery, war is peace and, now, suicide is asymmetrical warfare against the U.S.

I'll also note that the notion that our enemy has "no regard for human life, either ours or their own," is a racist notion that gets dredged up every time we're at war. My dad heard it about the Japanese when he was fighting in the Pacific in WWII. I heard it about the Vietnamese when we went to war against Viet Nam. I think the European settlers said it about the Native Americans when the Europeans were invading America. It's an old lie, and an ugly lie.

For the love of God, would if fucking kill us to admit that Gitmo was a huge disaster, to express remorse and sorrow for the despair that led these men to kill themselves, and start trying to act like civilized members of the Globe?