President Obama pranced into the Oval Office thinking that he was going to be Mr. Morals and shut down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp like some sort of cheerleader for rational democracy. Bureaucratic nonsense will have a little something to say about that. The knee-jerk reactions of congress, errors of the last administration, and thick skulled will of the American people tossed a wrench into that moral machine.
In January, Obama signed an executive order stating that Guantanamo would be closed within a year and he suspended prosecution of detainees for 120-days to review each case. He had this bold initiative to review the cases to see how they should be properly prosecuted, but little did he know the previous administration didn’t bother to assemble files or any real evidence for many of the detainees. That’ll show him. Try reviewing a case that doesn’t exist.
In 2001, President Bush signed his own executive order stating that detainees could be held indefinitely and the Justice Department backed him and advised that Guantanamo Bay is outside of U.S. legal jurisdiction. In one of this country’s darkest and most insecure moments, Bush punched a hole in the laws that we hold sacred by creating a candyland of torture that’s void of morality. So it’s not surprising that we don’t have records on the people that we were probably not planning on charging with anything in the first place.
That’s not an exaggeration. Since Bush signed his executive order in 2001, three people have been convicted of supporting terrorism against the United States. It’s obvious that it’s not working. The solution is to continue investigations and try the detainees in the courts that we’ve created to handle criminal activities. One would have to have an extremely low opinion of the justice system to think that it can’t handle “enemy combatants.” If the justice system that we have in place isn’t reliable enough to handle broad threats like “enemy combatants,” then it’s time to reassess its validity and strength. One of the reasons why this isn’t happening is the fear of bringing the detainees to America.
This has become a Republican talking point that’s caught fire with the average Joe. And if the average person fears it then the next step is the grandstanding politician. Senator Pat Roberts from Kansas made the point that no detainees would be confined to any Kansas facility on his watch. Why not?
It’s as if the people making the argument to keep detainees out of the United States think that we’re housing Megatron at Guantanamo. If we decided to house them at a high security prison on our soil, I’m pretty sure they’re not suddenly going to develop superman-like powers and wreak havoc on downtown Topeka. And if that were at all a possibility, why are they in Cuba? It’s an odd perspective to think that it’s too dangerous to house these prisoners on U.S. soil but they’re perfectly fine in Cuba because only Cuban lives are at stake.
Our maximum security prisons were built for hardened criminals and not just the emaciated pot dealers that occupy them. We’ve housed some of the most heinous criminals you can imagine. We’ve successfully locked up the Unabomber, Tim McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the co-ed killer Edmund Kemper and a vast array of lunatics. I’m pretty sure we can handle Osama bin Laden’s driver.
