Guantanamo is not a Place

Amid all the news, sound and fury, a small news story quickly passed through the great digital consciousness of America. The U.S. Congress has decided that all persons convicted of any "sex crime" (including consensual sex with a biologically mature seventeen year old,) can be held indefinitely without further trial after their sentence is up. In other words, someone given 2 years by a complicated trial of judge and jury can be held for the remainder of their natural life without any legal rights. Some will say that it serves the sexual predators fairly. Well, I'm not writing to defend sexual predators. However, our laws our deeply flawed and our enforcement and legal protections even less so. As people like "the innocence project" have proved time and time again, we're quite capable of convicting entirely innocent people. And now, instead of serving two years unjustly because a perceptive judge wanted to mitigate any possible injustice, they'll serve their whole lives probably based on how well they adjust to our big brother prisons with their social workers(and maybe on whether they confess their non-existent guilt.)

I find it highly ironic that our society talks so much about human rights, personal freedom, and even libertarian ideals. And yet the things that are happening in practice really do resemble the worst big-brother practices that have been in force during various barbarous rules in the past: for example the Soviet Union. Yes, let's protect the citizenry from health-care and education, but where's the noise when the congress defecates on the bill of rights, and the more important human rights and ideals of liberty which that document was designed to protect?