Gitmo.....Honor? ...I think not

[Ichingcarpenter]

Guantanamo Bay is a Stunningly Expensive Failure


Macho preening does not enhance national security. Nor does lying. Or flushing away hundreds of millions of dollars. But somehow such nonsense has become accepted dogma among America’s political gongoozlers—particularly conservatives—when it comes to the Guantanamo Bay detention center.

I remember when I realized Guantanamo had been transformed from the best of bad options (where do you hold and interrogate terrorists captured overseas?) into a jingoistic talking point designed to spark cheers from fist-pumpers. It was 2007, and the Republican presidential primary race was under way. Until then, President George W. Bush and his administration had always burbled the right words about Gitmo since it was opened in 2002: It was a temporary solution. They wanted to close it, and they would as soon as they could.

But that year, Mitt Romney—a politician who, if monkeys could vote, would start swinging naked through the trees—proclaimed that if he was president, he would double Guantanamo. His audience roared with approval, while I scratched my head. Double what, exactly? Double the landmass, perhaps by bringing in thousands of amphibious dump trucks loaded with dirt? Double the number of people held at Gitmo, as if there were hundreds of terrorists being released from custody because there weren’t enough cells to hold them? Cram twice as many buildings into the tight area for the detention center to house all of these imaginary captured terrorists?


Romney, of course, wasn’t making an actual proposal—he is too smart to believe such drivel. No, he was just saying things, implying facts that had no basis in reality for the purpose of thrilling the GOP’s less-than-reflective conservative wing. Guantanamo had become a tough-guy totem, a linguistic muscle flex, no different from photo ops of politicians hunting, throwing axes, driving pickup trucks or otherwise trying to disguise their soft-skinned penchant for $3,000 suits beneath an unseemly veneer of faux-manliness. But that bit of sound-bite swagger signaled that the detention center had become a serious policy issue that would no longer be dealt with seriously.

From the moment Barack Obama assumed the presidency, the conservative meme of Gitmo as the true symbol of toughness and Americanism became encased in concrete. Forget the fact that not a single high-profile terror suspect captured in the United States had been shipped to the detention center throughout the entirety of the Bush administration. Suddenly, everyone had to go to Gitmo, the conservatives proclaimed.

The guy who tried to light an explosive hidden in his skivvies on a plane flying in from Europe? Not sending him to Gitmo was near treason, conservatives bleated—even though in the Bush years, the shoe bomber who did nearly the same thing was tried in a criminal court. And the Boston Marathon bomber? Off to Gitmo! they demanded—conveniently ignoring that he was an American citizen who could not lawfully be deprived of his constitutional rights and shipped offshore. And then there was Ahmed Ghailani, who was brought from Guantanamo to the United States where he was tried in criminal court, convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. Ghailani begged to be sent back to Guantanamo—it was nicer, he said, than American prisons. And conservatives gnashed their teeth and rent their clothes because Obama wouldn’t give this terrorist what he wanted (although they never said it that way).

The truth is, Guantanamo doesn’t work.........................

http://www.newsweek.com/2014/08/15/guantanamo-bay-moral-outrage-263051.html

[merrily]

1. The Bill of Rights makes no distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

I wish people would stop pretending it does. It says only what the federal government cannot do at all, whether you are a citizen, a resident, a tourist or whatever.