The question is worth asking. Ariel Castro has been given a life sentence and an additional 1,000 years. If a 1,000-year sentence does not convey overwhelming disgust I do not know what else would.
In an older day, not too long ago in fact, Castro would not only have been executed without a trial but also tarred, feathered, and castrated in the public square. In other words, a lynch mob would have desecrated his body as they hoped to send his soul to Hell.
What was Castro's crime? He kidnapped three innocent girls and kept them for 11 years, torturing and raping them.
Castro said on his behalf that he is not the violent man he has been portrayed, that he did not torture anyone, that the rapes were not rapes at all but consensual.
This testimony is widely mocked.
You don't seem to need a psychiatric credential to say this man is delusional, to ridicule his supposed defense of what he did. Psychiatrists have weighed in, but so have almost every media commentator and news reporter. His crimes and the sentencing have made the front pages.
And yet, what the US government has done for eleven years to these boys - who have become men - at Guantanamo should to a civilized people be indistinguishable from what Castro did for eleven years to three girls.
But where are our mainstream commentators tripping over each other to express shock, demand justice, and use their front pages for the injustice of Guantanamo prison?
The United States government maintains the Guantanamo gulag on occupied territory on the south end of Cuba. This fact is virtually never reported. The Cuban government has demanded for almost 60 years the US leave its island. The US ignores the Cuban government.
The US government ignores a few other things: the Geneva Convention, Nuremberg Principles, habeas corpus, and access to attorneys are all sidelined as the mob of an older day clearly wants to desecrate the bodies of these men.
Guantanamo Naval Base has been used for various nefarious purposes since the US imposed its presence there at gunpoint. Most recently after the 9/11 attacks, the base became one of several judicial no-man's lands for young, battle-aged Muslim men from the expanding war zones in the Middle East and Asia: to be water-boarded and various other methods of interrogation, all for the good of the "cause."
As we suspected then and know now, not all the boys and men the US troops kidnapped were waging any war. They were said to be on the battle field, which when fighting something called "terrorism" can be anywhere you say it is.
Among the over 700 men the US Dept of Defense maintains or has maintained at Guantanamo, none to my knowledge have made the front pages or elicited the robust indignation of our American commentators. Attempts at bringing their cases to court are rebuffed.
The US, like Ariel Castro, offers a bizarre defense: We are not torturing. Or, what we do is not technically torture. Or, one of our bureaucrats has certified what we are doing is OK. Or, its the fault of the detainees being in the wrong place.
But no one among our elites mocks the United States government for its delusions.
As far as I know Ariel Castro was not in charge of what went on in Guantanamo. There is no link, and I do not mean to suggest any.
But I am waiting for the conspiracy theories that he was a CIA assassin trained at Abu Graib. Such theories came out after 9/11 about the conspirators, followed the underwear bomber, and were hinted about the Boston Marathon perpetrators.
What these conspiracy theories reveal - in themselves, true or not, and I am in no position to know since my government keeps its cards close at hand, telling me nothing and suspecting me of everything - is an actual, clear moral force, a lack of any hypocrisy.
This is unique characteristic if you only follow the mainstream media and digest the lies of the elites, who forgive us our trespasses but mightily and overwhelmingly condemn trespassers.
In such conspiracy theories is a consistence. It acknowledges an evil, a crime against humanity, and it links these crimes, one to another, and singles out a probable culprit.
Isn't this what police detectives do, after all? Patterns.
Many scoff at these strange conspiracy theories, but the fact of them says just as much about some of us, which I do find encouraging, as the overwhelming hypocrisy among our intelligentsia says about them. We don't means test our victims. A crime is a crime. We are trying to connect dots. Their only standard is the king can do no wrong: this opens the door to no standard at all, and the worst kind of human being.
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