In the category of "I thought we were in agreement on this issue," presumed guilt for Guantanamo detainees is still very much an acceptable perspective for an average American to hold. I will now demonstrate this through the very scientific rhetorical technique known as "here's a conversation I had today with a person."

When I found out today that the Guantanamo Uighurs were probably going to be sent to Palau, my first thought was "is that the country that sold their domain name?" Apparently not, that was Tuvalu. Since at the time (full disclosure: two hours ago) I didn't know that Palau was a trust territory of the US until 1994 and has since been in a free association agreement with the US - facts that would make their cooperation on this issue seem less random - I wanted to share this exciting bit of trivia with a coworker.

I was planning to say "hey, they decided to send the Uighurs to Palau. How weird is that?" But then I realized that my coworker might not know who the Uighurs were or the controversy surrounding their detention in Guantanamo, the highly publicized trials, and the humiliation the Bush administration suffered when the courts ridiculed their claims that the Uighurs were terrorists. So I just said "hey, those Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo who were innocent-" at which point I was cut off by my coworker saying "so how come they're at Guantanamo?"

I experienced a momentary loss of words and then explained to him about that whole thing where most of the people at Guantanamo have actually not had any trials so we don't know whether they're innocent or guilty but these fellas were in fact tried and were found to be quite innocent so now they have to be let go like real innocent people. That took the punch out of my tidbit about Palau.

But it reminded me of my preoccupation with presumed guilt. In any conversation about Israel, I generally assume that my conversation partner thinks that all Palestinians are terrorists. It's not that hard for me to inhabit this perspective because when I was growing up this is what I was told and this is what I believed. Even up through high school when I generally considered myself a politically engaged young person (hey hey policy debate), I still pretty much thought that Palestinian = terrorist. It's as if somehow the entire population of the West Bank and Gaza were collectively guilty of the violent actions of some Palestinians. It sounds crazy to me now but it's a standard pro-Israel narrative. After all, why would collective punishment be necessary if it weren't for collective guilt?

Due to this personal history with presumed guilt and the rhetoric of the Bush administration during the last eight years I became accustomed to the perspective that Guantanamo detainees were necessarily terrorists and assumed that any conversation partner on the issue of Guantanamo would hold this perspective. But since a majority of Americans supported the closing of Guantanamo in January, I assumed that mostly doctrinaire conservatives would be the ones holding on to this belief six months later. But apparently not. The closing of Guantanamo has become much less popular since Obama first took office. I suspect this is mainly due to Republican "no terrorists in my backyard" PR which eagerly attempts to rehabilitate the myth that everyone in Guantanamo is a bona fide evildoer.

Despite the widely covered disageements over the issue and what I assumed was common knowledge that the Guantanamo detainees were being held without trial (or even charges in most instances), the desire to assign collective guilt to the accused remains strong. Just the fact of Obama's election has widened the scope of political debate and changed the nature of popular consciousness on many issues. More liberal positions have been legitimized as part of the national dialogue on some issues - to the point that the last eight years of incredibly constricted political debate have in many instances been totally whitewashed. Watching a 2006 Phil Donahue debate with Bill O'Reilly about the legitimacy of the war in Iraq instantly took me back to a very recent past in which the need to get out of Iraq was a highly controversial position instead of a given. At the same time as some positions have become commonplace, other popular misconceptions have not been so easily changed. There's still a lot of work to be done.