The Lakhdar Boumediene Case: Why Incremental Change Is Politics Over Ethics:
From the prepared testimony of paranoid journalist Steven Emerson, who sees angry Muslim terrorists everywhere he looks, and general paranoiac Jonathan Levin to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, July 31, 2003: "According to one news report from Sarajevo, Boumediene Lakhdar and Nechle Mohamed, two Al-Qaeda members arrested in 2001 for planning terrorist attacks against the U.S. and British Embassies in Sarajevo, were administrators for the Red Crescent." Several times in other situations, it was stated as fact that Lakhdar Boumediene was an al-Qaeda member, which would be true if he had been an al-Qaeda member. But he was not. And he wasn't planning jack shit.

But he was sent to Gitmo for almost eight years to be interrogated in our delightfully enhanced way after a year in custody in Bosnia. It's a little like being kicked in the nuts and then being put into a small room with hungry rats. In fact, it was almost exactly like being kicked in the nuts and then being put into a small room with hungry rats. The rats in this case would be the enhanced interrogators (which sound like they have chemically-enlarged dicks, but probably the exact opposite is true).

The Gitmo torturers weren't even looking for him to confess to what he had been arrested for in the first place. No, they decided he knew something about Osama bin Laden and were gonna abuse him until he gave something up. He eventually lied to stop the mistreatment. And then, after court decision after court decision, including a by-the-fingernails 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, Boumediene was freed. He's living in France now, with his family and his kids who are learning just who the fuck he is, which you can be damned sure ain't who the fuck he was nearly nine years ago.

What we've learned about Barack Obama as our President is that he works incrementally, bit by bit. It's sort of like the way you can act when you're fucking some guy's virgin ass. The kind, caring lover does it gradually, shoving his lubed, condomed cock in bit by bit, taking several fuckings to actually get to the point where the muscles are stretched and ready to take the whole sausage.

So Obama gets us used to something slowly, holding back and holding back while moving ever so intently forward. Obama operates on the idea that we'll get used to shit as we go along. Look at what's happened today. An accused terrorist has been brought to the United States from Guantanamo. He's here now, on our soil, looking all dark and third-world, like he just wants to fillet him some 'Mericans. Ahmed Ghailani is a safe choice because he's not associated with 9/11 or any attack on U.S. soil. If all goes well, if he's convicted and locked up without doing movie shit like breaking his chains, grabbing a gun, and going on a multi-state killing spree, then Obama will have thrust enough to allow more prisoners to be brought over and really tried. And at some point it will just be boring and we will have moved on to whatever is going on with Jon and Kate, tuning out the news noise.

Again, it's the way Obama governs, for the most part. Very deliberately, with gathering momentum. It's the way he operated his campaign. It's what he's doing with gay marriage and other issues. You render the unusual quotidian so that nobody notices that change has occurred until it's pointed out to them. Rather ingenious in its own reluctant way, mitigating political opposition and building support for a policy by dint of its ordinariness and obviousness.

We can (and will) argue about this approach. But there's times when you just need to bend some willing but nervous partner over, shove your cock in, and get to fucking. Sure, there'll be that gasp, the pain, but, goddamn, sometimes it's just the right moment, and for both of you, there's nothing but good times ahead. Pop that cherry - don't slowly drip the juice out.

And when it comes to Gitmo, the number of Boumedienes is unknown. The Algerian himself was only released, finally, last month, well, well after he had been described repeatedly as among "the worstest of the worstest that ever worsted a worst" or whatever torture lovers are saying now about people who have been convicted of nothing.

The moral, ethical, and legal imperatives of action far outweigh the political risk in just fucking closing Gitmo already (Obama's got less than eight months to do it to live up to his stated goal post-campaign). As Boumediene said, "The first month, okay, no problem, the building, the 11 of September, the people, they are scared, but not 7 years. They can know whose innocent, who's not innocent, who's terrorist, who's not terrorist. I give you 2 years, no problem, but not 7 years."

It's hard to argue with a man who can say that to us after how we treated him.