Over the weekend I found myself reading, with rising anger, Joe Lelyveld's piece in the New York Review of Books about the mess in which America finds itself with its misguided (to put it kindly) policy of locking up foreigners, sorry "furrners", indefinitely, offshore, and without charge, in pursuit of the so-called War on Terror. Lelyveld, who as I understood it was supposed to have moved from the New York Times to the New Yorker, but who appeared once in the latter only to have vanished, Joseph Mitchell-style, ever since, puts in clear and rational terms the combination of barbarity, inhumanity and inextricability that can only lead to ever-larger chickens coming home to roost at some point in the future.
But for the Australian reader, concerned about the terrible plight of David Hicks and his total abandonment by his own government, this passage, written for purposes other than to highlight Hicks's predicament, does just that:
"In all, more than 250 Guantánamo prisoners have been repatriated. In some cases their release appears to have had more to do with diplomatic pressure applied by allied countries in which they had legal residence than with the facts of their particular cases."
Hello? Didn't we blindly march backwards into Iraq, side by side with America, without even waiting to be asked? Haven't we remained there, through thick and thin, as practically all other members of the "coalition" have seen Iraq revealed as America's own folly, and gone home? That doesn't seem to give us as much clout as I would have thought it would, particularly given the "special relationship". Or maybe nobody in Canberra has thought to test it out?
