Must- Read Commentary

James Norton in the Christian Science Monitor:

At its root, the very idea of Guantánamo Bay runs headfirst into what it means to be an American.

The US has (or had) a worldwide reputation for promoting human rights. That reputation was earned by its struggle - often against itself, as was the case during the fight against slavery, and the civil rights movement - to protect individuals against systems that would otherwise mistreat them.

The roots of that reputation run deep, reaching back to the Enlightenment ideals that gave birth to the essential protections of the Constitution. But a lot of countries merely talked the talk at the time of their birth - there's a mile-wide gap between the high-flying rhetoric of the French Revolution and the blood bath that followed.

But George Washington and his compatriots took their founding principles quite seriously. On Aug. 11, 1775, Washington sent a blistering letter to a British counterpart, Thomas Gage. He complained about gravely wounded and untreated American soldiers being thrown into a jail with common criminals.

Eight days later, despite threatening to treat British soldiers with equal cruelty, Washington admitted that he could not and would not retaliate in kind, writing: "Not only your Officers, and Soldiers have been treated with a Tenderness due to Fellow Citizens, & Brethren; but even those execrable Parricides [traitors] whose Counsels & Aid have deluged their Country with Blood, have been protected from the Fury of a justly enraged People."

Imagine that; a government on the run fighting a desperate war against a hated enemy and treating captured prisoners with compassion and decency. No doubt many of the captured British troops had intelligence that might have been useful to the Revolutionary cause - still, decent treatment was the norm. In the current war on terror, that would be described as being "soft."

There's more where that came from. It's refreshing to read someone who remembers the world I grew up in, instead of trying to fathom the mind-bending official statements along the lines of "Get down! They're hanging themselves at us!!" It's a piece I'm glad has been written, though I wish it hadn't needed to be.

You don't have to be a historian or political scientist to realize that it's high time the US government took a step back toward its founding principles and shut down Guantánamo Bay. Accountability for those who loosened the restraints of human decency, and a bit of reparations for everyone unjustly imprisoned also might be the civilized thing to do. In fact, it would be downright American.