Catch-22, Gitmo-style

Yossarian: Let me see if I've got this straight: in order to be grounded, I've got to be crazy and I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I'm not crazy any more and I have to keep flying.

enter guantanamo...

On Jan. 18, 2002, six men suspected of plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy were seized here by U.S. troops and flown to Cuba, where they became some of the first arrivals at the Pentagon's new prison at Guantanamo Bay.

The seizure was ordered by senior U.S. officials in defiance of rulings by top courts in Bosnia that the men were entitled to their freedom and could not be deported. Today, more than four years later, the six remain locked up at Guantanamo, even though the original allegations about the embassy attack have been discredited and dropped, records show.

[...]

The detainees and their lawyers say they are caught in a trap. They contend that the Pentagon knows the men are not guilty but is unwilling to let them go free because that would be an acknowledgment of a grave error.

"The Americans did not want to return me to Bosnia. Why? Because the Americans claimed to have evidence against me. I can't be returned and found innocent," Mustafa Ait Idr, one of the six Algerians, told a military tribunal at Guantanamo in October 2004, according to a transcript of the hearing.

"So now I am sitting here in Cuba and I do not know why. I do not know what is happening outside; I do not know. But what I do know is that this is a game."

catch-22, in its generally accepted connotation, signifies something twisted into a bizarre and vaguely surreal shape by an arcane, faceless, and self-serving bureaucracy... what has been added to the definition by the bush administration is hubris and supreme arrogance to say nothing of the total abandonment of humanitarianism and justice and the destruction of innocent human lives...

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