The Corpuscle

I was listening to an interview with Dershowitz this morning and he was talking about his new book, Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways. At one point, he made mention of an idea I'd heard elsewhere, possibly in an interview I heard the other day with, I believe,  Caroline Daniel, White House correspondent for the Financial Times. They both were talking about the need for some sort of middle judicial way for dealing with alleged miscreants like the people currently being held by the U.S. Government in Guantanamo.

Okay, so let's have this "third way" already. If we can't try the prisoners in Guantanamo because we might accidentally find them not guilty, and if we can't hold them as prisoners of war because there isn't a real war that will actually end at some point so we can eventually let them go, well then... whatever the hell we're going to do with them, let's do it already.

Say, I have an idea. Let's use them as slaves.

Using enemy prisoners as slaves is something of a grand tradition among your tonier imperial powers, I believe. In the old days, all your best hegemonic enterprises had enemy prisoner slaves.

Look, I know at first blush the idea seems a bit dicey, but hear me out.

First of all, think about the plight of these shmucks down there. They have to wear these bright orange outfits. You know they aren't getting to shower more than once a week or so. Funkeeee! People are bugging them day after day for information which, assuming they had any in the first place, is years out of date by now. They're hanging around in cages with nothing to do but read their Holy Books (assuming somebody didn't flush their copy down the toilet, of course). How boring is that? I dunno, do they get to exercise at all? Shooting baskets? Tossing the football? A little four-square maybe?

We get reports of hunger strikes and people trying to hang themselves with their underwear or what-all. I mean, come on, can you blame them? What else is there to do? I don't even think they get to watch T.V.

Everybody knows the benefits of having to get up every morning and put in a good day's work. It gives you a dependable schedule, plenty of invigorating exercise, a sense of accomplishment, improved sleep patterns, less depression and it keeps your bowels regular. I've had one sort of job or another ever since I moved away from home and I've never once felt the urge to hang myself with my underpants.

So, you know, I think we can all agree that it would be better to give these guys something meaningful to do everyday -- polishing the Caddie, cleaning out the septic tank, having compulsory kinky sex with their owners -- than to leave them down there to just rot.

And, yes, I can already hear the Constitutional Scholars whining about the 13th Amendment:

Section 1: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Okay, I can see that being a problem for some people. But look, we've also got these sections in the Constitution:

Article I, Section 7: The Congress shall have Power... To declare War...

and

Amendment IV: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

and we've pretty much found our way around those. We need a memo, here, is all. Get the Attorney General on the case.

There are about 600 prisoners down there -- er, I mean, detainees, of course -- so that's clearly not enough guys to give every American citizen a slave. I was trying to figure out how we'd do this... have a drawing? Like a raffle or something? But then it occurred to me that there are 535 members of Congress. Throw in the nine Justices of the Supreme Court. That brings us up to 544. President and Vice-President gets us to 546. Members of the Cabinet probably gets us up to about 555. So, you know, we have a few left over. Maybe Rumsfeld and Condi Rice could get a couple extra each. I don't know. These sorts of details can be worked out.

The argument for giving them to the members of our government is based on the fact that you don't want to be inhumane about this. You want to do it the right way, if you're going to do it. If you've ever spent any time at all in the BDSM scene, you'll know how truly hard it is to find competent and skilled bondage tops. Most of them, I mean, really, they just have no idea of how to properly dom their slave-meat. It's embarrassing sometimes. These guys... Congress, the President, the Justices... seems to me they've got the sort of experience we're looking for here, and as Bush has famously said: "It's hard. It's hard work."

I, personally, have never doubted for a moment that it's hard. I'll bet it's hard all the time, twenty four hours a day. So why shouldn't they get a little help with all that hardness?

Yeah, yeah, "world opinion", the "Geneva Convention", and all that. Well, we live in a different world now, don't we? Everything changed after 9/11, didn't it? We owe it to America to use these guys as slaves.

Otherwise the terrorists will have won, see.