Secret Gitmo Panels

This Morning Edition report (11/21/2006 - 8:56) presents audio recordings of the secret world of military tribunals at the U.S. prison camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The recordings were made by the U.S. military in the fall of 2004 in order to review the "enemy combatant" status of six detainees (all Algerians) who were arrested in Bosnia in late 2001, and later acquitted, for a suspected bombing plot. At that point, they were then taken into U.S. custody and sent to Guantanamo Bay. You can read the declassified documents here.
Musings

• Again we are faced with the question of who should have basic legal rights (to have a lawyer, to confront accusers, to see charges, and so forth) when confronting the power of a state to imprison people for life. And here there seems to be three possible answers: only Americans citizens, only American citizens who are free of any suspicions, or anyone and everyone.
  
  
• There is something especially ordinary, bureaucratic, mundane about the interactions on the tapes themselves. The U.S. officials seem earnest, sincere--people trying to do their duty--ye the whole thing also has an air of the absurd.
  

Dorothea Lange and Internment Camps

From Talk of the Nation (11/21/2006 - 13:15) comes this discussion of a new book on photographs that Dorothea Lange took of Japanese-Americans internment camps. More than 100,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese heritage were forcibly moved, under orders by President Franklin Roosevelt, in response to widespread fears following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Musings

• The first caller in the segment raises the connection between the WWII interment camps and our treatment of enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens, following 9/11. One point might be that we lack such compelling images that we have here. What are some of the other differences and similarities?
  
  
• Dorothea Lange is one of America's great photographers. Although we do not learn a lot about her from this segment, there is more at Wikipedia, including a copy of her most famous photo, Migrant Mother.