“Giblets.” “6/10 changed everything.” Fafblog!, June 13, 2006.

Summary: Three detainees at our concentration camp at Guantánamo committed suicide by hanging on June 10. The camp's Kommandant, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, provided the official explanation for this act of desperation: “They have no regard to life, neither ours nor their own. And I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us.” Colleen Grady, a deputy assistant secretary of state, elaborated on the detainees' motive, describing the suicides as “a good PR move to draw attention.”

Giblets, who is naturally thrown into a state of panic by this terrifying attack on the United States (“a noose is just a suicide bomb with a very small blast radius, people!”), calls for an immediate response:

Giblets demands immediate retaliatory airstrikes on depressed Muslim torture victims throughout the mideast! ... Even as we speak the forces of Islamanazism are infiltrating our network of classified CIA prison camps, rendering themselves to third world dictatorships, and launching unprovoked assaults on innocent American bullets! There's only one thing to do with all these malicious prisoners, torture victims, and massacred civilians -- and that's to imprison, torture and massacre them before they can mount another attack!

A skeptic might wonder, though, whether it would not be better, as in many guerrilla wars, to adopt the enemy's tactics and retaliate in kind, restoring the symmetry. If, say, Rear Admiral Harry Harris were to hang himself, wouldn't that be just as effective a contribution to our side's victory in the war on terrorism as the detainees' suicide was to theirs? And wouldn't it be a great PR move for the United States if Colleen Grady volunteered to take her own life in the cause of freedom?

Actually, it would be sufficient for the managers and defenders of Guantánamo simply to resign from their positions and retire from public life. Though less dramatic than suicide, this course of action would be more consistent with our supposed regard for life -- the detainees' and our own.