The Diva and the Army Private

To the author of the following Facebook post:

Whitney Houston had a drug problem, went to rehab, died in her bathtub and got recognized on the news and internet. NJ governor ordered the flags half mast on Saturday as a tribute to Whitney. 24 year old Army Pfc. Cesar Cortez, assigned to 5th Battalion, 52nd Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 11th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, Fort Bliss, Texas, died the exact same day serving during Operation Enduring Freedom and I, personally, haven’t heard his name until now. If you believe that the people who are dying daily for your and my freedom are the true American heroes and deserve more respect than any celebrity, then copy and post.

I am declining to repost this on my Facebook page.  It is a mean and faulty argument that unnecessarily brings two very different issues into competition.  But before I explain that, let me point out that it makes an absolute and prejudicial statement that you cannot possibly know is true, and that I wouldn’t repost without changing that anyway.  It’s the concluding statement that’s the problem.  As a teacher of writing I tell my students to try and avoid absolute statements unless they are sure they are true.

An Army carry team moves a transfer case containing the remains of Pfc. Cesar Cortez Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2012 at Dover Air Force Base, Del. According to the Department of Defense, Cortez, 24, of Oceanside, Calif. , died Feb. 11, 2012 in Bahrain.

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Human Costs of Guantanamo Prison

Camp DeltaThe closing of “Gitmo” is long overdue, there is no doubt about it. But shutting it down is more difficult than one might think. This post contains two articles that illustrate the problem. They are not the best or the most compelling, they are simply the two that showed up on my computer screen today. Tomorrow there will be another. Where are those people to go? In some cases they have to homes to return to, in others they are persecuted in their home country. In other cases their country of origin doesn’t want them back. Others are stateless.

We have prisoners who have been detained there since the beginning of our invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan who have never been charged with a crime and who, in many cases, are innocent. But if it is true that prisoners in the regular American penal system are hardened by the system and more likely to be come recidivist, what happens when that facility is a military run prison camp. And what happens with the prisoner, once just a taxi driver or farmer in the wrong place at the wrong time, is locked up next to folks who are, in fact, ruthless radical religious terrorists? What is that person going to think of Western democracy and Western systems of justice when he spends years in a prison without even the semblance of due process? I shudder to think!

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For Gitmo Uighurs, new life is no walk on the beach
Photo by writingJulie @flickr