WE THE PEOPLE

Many USers are worried about the Obama government's plan to try five of the detainees from the US concentration camp at Guantanamo. Good Americans, they are worried that the five captives may not be convicted in our courts. Many Americans are afraid of justice, afraid of the rule of law.

It is possible that justice might prevail in the trial of those five men. The evidence against them was likely gained by illegal surveillance, or by torturing them. It won't be admissable in court.

Rather than face that possibility, many USers want to keep those men in prison for the rest of their lives. Many Americans want to "disappear" them. Are there any USers left who remember when Americans responded with horror at the "disappearances" of people in other countries?

Of course, the United States has "disappeared" people for years, thanks to the thugs at CIA and NSA. And for the last nine years we have held hundreds of "disappeared" people at Guantanamo--and still hold them there, a full year after we elected a president who promised to close down that illegal torture camp.

Presumably, the Obama government thinks it has something of a case against these five men. But the other 300? The government must not have a case against any of them; the only thing they may have done wrong was get captured.

"Abandon hope all you who enter here." That's what the sign says as you enter Dante's Hell--or Guantanamo. And if many USers had their way, the motto of the American courts would be what the Artful Dodger thinks ofthe English courts in Dickens's Oliver Twist: "This ain't the shop for justice."

Our patriotic friends and neighbors say, "We can't trust our courts to lynch people."

Americans aren't a people who respect law, or want justice. We aren't even a "we," really. And not believing in justice or society, we aren't a "people."