HE’S BEEN CHARGED, he’s back from his summer home in Kandahar, and the talk shows fill with John Walker again, and it won’t be the last time, will it? There will be no closure for us, folks. He will be in our lives forever, even from prison, a specter that reappears and floats, impossible to swat away, always out of reach, like the pink elephant to the drunk. It’s that face, I think, that quilt of all our ugliest patches: the Ted Kaczynski hair, the Charles Manson eyes, the Sara Jane Olson moral grounding.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about with the other prisoners. I mean, it’s got to be immensely difficult to transport, house, and guard hundreds of highly trained monsters who really, really believe the only surefire way to guarantee an eternity-long wet one from God is to rip out your throat with their teeth. That’s for starters. Then the usual suspects pipe up. The ACLU gets weepy over the threat to our Constitution, perhaps sincerely not noticing that they’re a threat to our Constitution. The International Red Cross races to Guantanamo to make sure that these terrific young men are all getting premium channels and not just basic cable.
