Things I don't understand

Last updated on: December 30, 2009 at 4:37 pm by Fred Clark

Things I don't understand 2009-12-30T16:37:45-05:00 Fred Clark

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One of the things that has mystified me over the past year has been the opposition to the proposed closing of the United States' offshore prison in Guanatanamo Bay, Cuba, and the related proposed trials for the terror suspects imprisoned there.

I haven't been able to address these topics because I haven't been able to engage the arguments against these things. I haven't been able to engage them because I haven't been able to locate them. It's not easy to have a conversation when the other side presents only an incoherent, terrified squealing.

The only intelligible things I've been able to discern in the whimpering defense of Guantanamo is the assertion that somehow this offshoring of prisoners makes the U.S. less of a target from the allies of the sort of people allegedly held there.

I can't make any sense of that claim. During the eight years in which Guantanamo's euphemistically named "detention facility" has been in operation, it has not become a target for terrorist attacks, distracting or diverting terrorists' attention away from other American targets domestic or abroad. It's not as though such terrorists are deceived by the clumsy fiction that these prisoners aren't really in American custody because their prison happens to be located on the island of Cuba.

Amidst their frightened sobbing, the Guantanamo Forever proponents also seem to be suggesting that the Gitmo prisoners would be less secure if held at the supermaximum security Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois. I can't make any sense of that claim either. Their idea seems to be that the criminal justice system entrusted with Timothy McVeigh, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui and Ted Bundy would be inadequate for handling the 200 or so people still held in our offshore gulag. What's the basis for that claim? And, if it's true, then don't we have an even more urgent problem, since that would mean our prisons are incapable of securing those from whom the public needs to be kept safe?

I mentioned Timothy McVeigh there. You'll recall that he was the domestic American terrorist who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in April, 1995, killing 168 people. McVeigh was arrested, tried, convicted, sentenced and executed by the same criminal justice system that our babbling, terrified friends are now insisting is incapable of handling justice for those imprisoned at Guantanamo.

When U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder first proposed New York City as the location for the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I thought of McVeigh and wondered if Holder could really pull that off. McVeigh, after all, was not tried in Oklahoma City, but in Denver, far from the hostile atmosphere of those most directly affected by the heinous crimes he was charged with. Manhattan is the last place on earth Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would want to face justice. Yet, confusingly, the selection of that venue has brought howls of protest from people claiming a Manhattan trial is a way of going easy on him. In what alternate reality does that argument make sense?

The closest I can come to making sense of what these folks want — I can't say to what they're "arguing" because, again, nothing they're saying is anywhere near that lucid — is to follow Matthew Yglesias' point here:

It’s worth emphasizing that as best I can tell the basic conservative view is actually that no criminal suspects are entitled to due process. They didn’t approve of the Miranda

ruling or any of the other Supreme Court precedents establishing the
rights of the accused. The argument that terrorists, or foreign-born
terrorists, or some other sub-class of individuals shouldn’t get those
rights isn’t really an argument about terrorists or non-citizens, it’s
just a thin edge of a general campaign against the rule of law.

That's a horrible, ugly thing to accuse anyone of, but it seems unavoidable.

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