Another open letter to one of the "worst of the worst"

"Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached?" - Franz Kafka, The Trial

Dear corpse of Mr. Gul,

Shucks. We sure are sorry that we "indefinitely detained" you - for eight years without charges, much less conviction, for any crime until you definitely died of a heart attack in prison - in order to protect & preserve important liberties like the right to a fair trial and habeus corpus. Golly, gee, it sure does eat us up that we have created a kangaroo legal system that was going to keep you in prison no matter what, but you have to admit, you were held in prison until you died, and you do have a Muslim name, so you must have been guilty of something.

As we put it to Mr. Odaimi:

[Y]ou were transfered into our Kafka-esque prison camp, which is your fault and not ours, but rest assured that we'll put this behind us by Looking Forward, Not Back ... We are sure this will be a great comfort to you, to know that we will not think of this again, and to help us not think of it again, we will make an exception to our Looking Forward, Not Back motto, to persecute anyone who has the nerve to bring to our attention any other such perfidy. With a little bit of time, we'll be able to forgive you for getting yourself ... locked up in Guantanamo all those years, giving people the silly notion that we're the sort of country that goes around locking up Muslims while denying them due process. Shoot, some of us will probably have already done you the favor of never even having heard of you, as is a habit with such matters.

You are welcome.

Were you alive and not dead, I am sure that it would come as a great comfort to you to know that the vast majority of Americans were not troubled by your death, nor were their consciences troubled with questions as to your innocence or guilt; we will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were guilty (of something.) You need not worry yourself that you have caused us any stress as a result of your inability to escape the legal blackhole like conditions of Guantanamo. We are more than willing to extend this courtesy to you and other such individuals.

So don't mention it, thanks is not necessary.