Has Gitmo imprisoned -- us?

Is Guantanamo Bay a quandary of our own making? The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg wonders. Recalling World War II, he writes: "By the tens of thousands, German soldiers were loaded aboard Liberty Ships, which had carried American troops across the Atlantic. Eventually, some five hundred P.O.W. camps, scattered across forty-five of the forty-eight United States, housed some four hundred thousand men. In every one of those camps, the Geneva conventions were adhered to so scrupulously that, after the war, not a few of the inmates decided to stick around and become Americans themselves. That was extraordinary rendition, Greatest Generation style." The 172 prisoners held at Gitmo aren't uniformed soldiers, of course. And al-Qaeda doesn't play by the Queensbury Rules. Still, as Hertzberg observes, "This relative handful of shackled, isolated prisoners has somehow been permitted to engender a miasma of popular fear and political cowardice that contrasts shamefully with the matter-of-fact courage of an earlier and simpler time." He's right. And the reasons why are worth pondering