Call me ignorant, call me naive, call me what you will. But reading that Guantanamo is being prepared by the U.S. military to house Haitian peoples who attempt to “leave their homeland and are captured at sea,” is disturbing to me, to say the least.

About 100 tents, each capable of holding 10 people, have been erected and authorities have more than 1,000 more on hand in case waves of Haitians leave their homeland and are captured at sea, said Navy Rear Adm. Thomas Copeman.

Authorities have also has tested the latrine facilities and gathered cots and other supplies, said Copeman, the commander of the task force that runs the detention center for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo, where the U.S. holds nearly 200 men.

The Haitian migrants would be held on the opposite side of the base as the detention center, separated by some 2 1/2 miles of water across Guantanamo Bay, and would have no contact with the prisoners.

The rush to militarize every aspect of what is a humanitarian effort speaks to the ultimate unsustainability of using the military as a life sustaining resource.

That is: how can an entity whose entire structure of being is based on the *elimination* of humanity (that is: efficiently *killing the ‘enemy’*) possibly be any damn good at saving lives? It goes against the explicit mission statement of everything the military has been in the U.s. since it’s conception. The military does not save lives, it kills the enemy. Something even the most hard line pro-military personnel would be hard pressed to argue against.

It reminds me of this article (via black looks) about the reported prioritizing of military solutions to this crisis over the Haitian people’s needs:

When you store your brains in your weaponry, then every situation is a security threat. US military in Haiti, hyper-vigilant about securing emergency relief, obviously missed the central purpose – get the supplies out to save lives.

Rather than using the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, it cost to set up all these tents for the “captured” survivors of horrific trauma–the U.S. *could* be using that money to get food and water and other resources to Haitian peoples where they are at. Because, you know, people don’t leave an area when they are not starving, desperate or otherwise at their wits end.

Can the military save lives? I guess by accident, anything can manage to pull off any feat. But I’d prefer that in the future we leave less to accidents and hope. Maybe a great way to create jobs would be the formation of a “Peace Time Crisis Team” whose only job would be to respond to disasters and natural catastrophes in a way that centered “how many lives can we save” over “what is the potential security threat of this situation?”

I know, I know. Call me a dreamer.