This American Life: Habeas Schmabeas

[tongodeon]

I was out running errands today when This American Life came on. Habeas Schmabeas was so good that I cut my errands short and went home to listen. Amazing stuff in there about the Guantanamo prisoners and their charges that I didn't know before. Next week when they put it up for free on RealAudio I'll write up the highlights.

Comments

[tensegritydan]

I heard the first half of it and was also astounded. Was the second half as good as the first?

[tongodeon]

First half was more striking. Second half had interesting historical background about a British Lord who put a bunch of Puritans into a remote island prison and suspended their habeas corpus rights, and how horrified the rest of the country was even 200 years before democracy. Another story about how America stopped Winston Churchill from suspending the Nazis' rights to a fair trial. Another story about the British intelligence reaction to us doing this to our prisoners. A lot of "history repeating."

[tongodeon]

The basics are already known, the details are what's horrifying. For example we know that many of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocent. What I didn't know is that the government determined it was 95%. Some of them have been formally declared NLEC: No Longer Enemy Combatants (another word for "never were enemy combatants") but they're not being released because it would be embarrassing. One of the prisoners was there because his friend was a suicide bomber. Except that the friend they say was a suicide bomber is still alive and living in London with no connection to any terror organization. Requests for details: "who saw this person meeting with Al Qaeda", "what job did this person have at training camps", are rebuffed with "sorry that's classified information". Except that some of those files were mistakenly declassified, and the secret classified files say "we have no evidence to support this

[tongodeon]

The NPR story won't matter, you know. Americans will go to extraordinary lengths to keep from seeing something wrong here. One thing ought to be clear: they simply don't believe in the need for habeus corpus anymore.

They mention that even in a time when torture was considered completely reasonable behavior it was still necessary to formally charge the criminals before they were tortured. It's weird that we're so squeamish about torture (or at least using the word) but we're comfortable with doing this to people who haven't been charged.

[doublejack]

I haven't heard it yet, but I just finished downloading the show from audible.com for $3.95. I may make an mp3 version available tomorrow if there's interest (and no one objects too strenuously to my anti-DRM ways...)

[zalriva1]

The audio for that is up.

[matrushkaka]

NPR offers free transcripts to the deaf; This American Life does not do transcripts, period.

From their website:

How can I get a transcript of a broadcast?

Sadly, we don't offer show transcripts. It's an expensive service, and we don't get nearly enough requests to justify it.