What did they tell us about Guantánamo? Exactly what we wanted to hear.

WikiLeaks recently released a trove of secret risk assessments regarding nearly every prisoner who has ever been held at Guantánamo Bay. I have been continually involved in Guantánamo litigation longer than any lawyer in the world, having been counsel of record in Rasul v. Bush, the first case that went to the Supreme Court from Guantánamo. Over the years, I have defended a number of prisoners at the base. Yet, in the Kafkaesque way that these things work, I cannot comment on the WikiLeaks material because they remain classified. But, even if I could, I would write about something else, because, when it comes to Guantánamo, oddities like this are no longer what matters. Indeed, they’ve been replaced by the base’s symbolism in the national consciousness.

It is sometimes said that the 1960s have become a cultural litmus test. A person’s mental image of that turbulent decade predicts a great deal about his or her position on many of the hot-button issues we face today. Those for whom the 1960s meant the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the end of Jim Crow, the narrowing of the chasm between rich and poor, and the wistful end of New Deal liberalism have a very different vision of the country than those for whom it meant urban riots, campus chaos, the assassination of two Kennedys and a King, dramatically rising crime rates, and the first welcome stirrings of modern conservatism. In this way, the decade was not simply ten years in the long march of a nation’s history, but a rare moment when competing visions of national identity collided in the public square.

We are quickly reaching a similar point regarding the meaning of, and proper response to, the attacks of September 11. Increasingly stable narratives are taking shape. These narratives vie to claim both the “true” understanding of the past and the proper direction of the future. And, as these narratives compete, the iconic images of the post-September 11 world—Guantánamo, waterboarding, military commissions, rendition, and countless others—are converted from policies that are either good or bad (and choices that were either wise or foolish) to symbols that represent particular visions of national identity. It is this symbolic potency that Karl Rove had in mind when he told a BBC journalist in March 2010 that he was “proud” of waterboarding and the other “enhanced” interrogation techniques. He meant that he was proud the United States had set itself on this course, and that staying the course by adhering to these methods symbolized America’s commitment to a particular vision of both the past and future.

So it was with the reaction to the WikiLeaks material. Readers discovered in the cache what they set out to find and hailed the discovery as confirmation of their prior views. The New York Times, for instance, editorialized that the documents—which it says were received from a third party that obtained them from WikiLeaks—were “a chilling reminder of the legal and moral disaster that President George W. Bush created [at Guantánamo]. They describe the chaos, lawlessness and incompetence in his administration’s system for deciding detainees’ guilt or innocence and assessing whether they would be a threat if released.” But, reviewing the same material, the National Review Online shrugged that “Wikileaks seems to be supporting Bush’s war on terror more than it’s causing any problems for the former administration.”

This shift from counter-terror policies to symbols of national identity is momentous and under-appreciated. As with our understanding of the 1960s, the competing visions of September 11 have produced hardening social narratives. These narratives explain the meaning and complexity of contemporary events, at least to the satisfaction of those who share the vision. But, to do so, the narratives must jealously insist upon an idiosyncratic approach to facts. Those that support the narrative are welcomed and assimilated, making the narrative stronger, and those that do not are ignored or dismissed. In time, as this creative use of evidence repeats itself, the narrative matures into myth, which misleads not so much by the falsehood it contains as by the truth it leaves out. In the end, for example, we are left with the myth of the 1960s as the golden years of the Great Society versus the myth of the decade as the moment when conservatism rescued the country from ruin. Or, in the post-September 11 context, the myth of a strong America attacked because of her values versus the myth of an American empire out of control.