At Borders I sat down in the cafe with books, but when I went to buy my coffee an employee gathered them to reshelve. So I had to find something else to read with my drink, some book on a shelf close by. Elie Wiesel jumped out at me in paperback. I read half of it just sitting there, because I couldn't stop.

It was the book in which he describes his own and his family's capture and imprisonment in Auschwitz.

What really got to me was his description of how unbelievably long his family and Jewish neighbors sat waiting in their homes, days after days after weeks, for the government to do something horrible to them. (All kinds of warnings had already come to them; in fact the book begins with a townsman who'd seen a truckload of people simply shot by German soldiers. He escapes and runs back to town and tells them, but no one really believes him.) They kept telling themselves that it would never happen -- it was unthinkable! This was the 20th century, for heaven's sake!

Governments don't do that!

Uh-huh. I'm sitting comfortably here while my government has held a couple hundred people in a prison for five years without charges. That prison was carefully chosen in a place where Americans can't go check on the people, can't get access, and can't even find out the names of the prisoners. My government has tortured a bunch of people by various methods, and videotaped it. It has also kidnapped lots of people and sent them to other countries to be tortured during interrogation.

This story of the holocaust is relevant right now, because of the silence and inaction then, and now. Guantanamo still operates, and the filthy administration which did all this is still in place.