So, I did end up going to catch Sir, No Sir earlier this week. Though a little heavy handed, and more than a little Manichean, it was basically a solid and effective documentary, which I hope I’ll get around to giving its own post later. Before the main event, though, there was an amateurish 5–10 minute short about the January 11th protests against prisoner abuses and the suspension of habeas rights at Guatnanamo Bay and other detention facilities. If you’ve seen any of the many, many articles I churned out on this topic for the Reason website, you know I’m pretty unambiguously with the protesters on all their central issues. And yet I found it almost impossible not to find these guys annoying.

As the hectoring, monotone narrator explains, the film shows a protest at the federal district courthouse here in DC. A few dozen people in orange jumpsuits and hoods, clutching ersatz habeas petitions, are herded toward the courthouse entrance by some pasty oaf bellowing demands that they be allowed in for their “day in court.” When they’re refused, they all crowd around the entrance and sit down in front of the door as a crowd of spectators chant “Let them in.” So, my three immediate thoughts were:

• I know it’s symbolic and all, but isn’t the point they’re trying to make kind of diminished by the fact that the guards are entirely justified in turning them away, insofar as they’re pretend detainees brandishing pretend habeas petitions, but it’s not a pretend court?
  
  
• Since the courts have actually been the ones upholding the habeas rights of detainees, isn’t the court the wrong target for protest here? Shouldn’t they be gathering outside the offices of the legislators who responded to court rulings favorable to the detainees with new laws attenuating their habeas rights? Especially given that legislators, not courts, are supposed to be democratically accountable?
  
  
• If you’re trying to protest the injustice of denying people held at Gitmo the right to have their grievances heard before a court of law, there’s got to be a less obtusely self-parodying way to do it than plopping yourself down at a courthouse entrance, thereby blocking the way of anyone who might show up seeking to have their grievances heard before a court of law.