Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Why? Why now?

You've probably heard by now that some guys locked up in Gitmo have claimed credit for 9/11. From the very instant I heard the 'news,' I smelled a rat. "Why now?" I wondered at first, and that remained the most solid question I could muster for a while, because my head was just spinning with all the unlikelihoods and impossibilities of the situation: unlikely, because we've been giving credit to so many others for The Deed -and persecuting them for the past seven years with a fervor unmatched since the Inquisition; unlikely because they've been in custody for years already and had apparently said nothing of the sort, before; impossible because they're in Gitmo, so they wouldn't have been allowed to confer with each other; impossible because they were not allowed to communicate with the press.

Larisa Alexandrovna offers a very well-informed analysis, far better than mine. As she writes, the real question here is not of their guilt or innocence, but: why are we being fed this story?

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