The Republicans are once again fear-mongering regarding the transfer of Gitmo detainees to maximum security federal prisons on the mainland:
Several Illinois lawmakers say the Chicago area would become a terrorist target if Guantanamo Bay detainees are moved to a prison in Thomson, 150 miles west of Chicago.
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is running for Obama’s old Senate seat, said he intends to ask Congress to assess potential security risks the move may pose to O’Hare International Airport and Willis Tower.
“With the busiest airport in the world and the tallest building in North America, I do not think that we should make Chicagoland the center of jihadi attention in the world,” Kirk said. “But if you concentrate four times the number of terrorists of anywhere else in the country in Illinois, you will make us ground zero for that attention.”
Since 1993, there has been one fiendishly successful, horrifyingly devastating Jihadi attack on U.S. landmarks. The chance that suddenly the Islamist terror network will pull off another one directed at the Sears (now Willis) Tower strikes me as rather low.
Chicago Tribune writer Steve Chapman has an excellent column on the potential over-interpretation of the Fort Hood massacre.
The same people who are cowering now didn’t seem to worry that starting two wars in the middle east and giving unconditional support to Israel were too big a terror risk.
They are just trying to score some political points against their opposition; that and they don’t want their dirty laundry aired.
Yes, the argument that moving Gitmo prisoners to the Chicago area will invite a terrorist attack on the city is overblown. Here’s a better argument for not doing so:
If keeping prisoners at Gitmo is wrong, then keeping them anywhere else is also wrong. If keeping the prisoners in Illinois isn’t wrong, then continuing to keep them at Gitmo also isn’t wrong. So, why spend a lot of money to refurbish a prison in Illinois when we already have a perfectly good prison at . . . Guantanamo Bay?
For Sen. Durbin, the answer would seem to be that doing so will bring a lot of federal jobs to his state.
For President Obama, it would seem to offer the chance to placate the Gitmo critics while holding on to the most dangerous Gitmo prisoners.
For the rest of us, it would be . . . what, exactly?
Considering how well gangs like MS-13, the Mexican Mafia, the Crips, the Bloods, and so and so forth do when it comes to running criminal enterprises behind bars, the fears of AQ replicating these models isn’t THAT overblown. At Gitmo, these guys are far more isolated from the rest of the world. Once they’re in CONUS, they can see lawyers, possibly family and friends, on a more routine basis. We can try to monitor them, but as most prison systems have found out, you can only do so much.
I have problems with Gitmo’s somewhat foggy status between criminal holding facility and POW camp, but let’s not pretend things will be hunky dory by bringing these guys here. There is an elevated risk. Is there some partisan hyping going on? Sure, but so what? That’s the system we have.
We’re keeping them in Gitmo (foreign soil) to avoid having to comply with our own laws. Sometimes locations matters. And this isn’t about where to keep them, it is about whether or not they get a fair trial.
At this point, the most solid evidence that we have heard of for the guilt of some of these people is that we think they did something, but it’s classified. Many have been released after it was determined they had done nothing wrong and were not dangerous, some after years of torture. Some have gone back to being good citizens, others have joined the enemy ranks since release. Both of these highlight the problem of torturing first and looking for evidence later.
The longer we hold them without fair trial, the less we look like the victim in the eyes of the world, and the more we look like the persecutor. It won’t make us safer.
Are we really afraid that their ideology will win out over our own among our own populace? I’d more likely expect them to be swiftly killed if they were allowed to mingle with other prisoners.
Maybe the fear of a jihadi attack on Sears Tower as a result of terrorists being held a 100 miles away from Chicago is overblown. I still think there is very good reason to keep them in Gitmo where there is close control and staff whose specific job it is to keep an eye on them.
And to be frank here, I don’t think we can trust in the civilian legal system or prison system here. Both are rife with serious issues and the conflict we’re engaged in is too serious to leave this matter to them. I don’t think the state has to be afraid of a fair trial per see, I think we have good reason to be afraid of a trial where what is fair is defined by liberal judges and divisions of ACLU lawyers.
Of course that is exactly why the U.S. under Obama and Holder have tried to put these things into the civilian system. It’s political grandstanding to gain a brief moment on the moral high ground.
Also on that article by Chapman, it’s rubbish. He makes it sound like weeding out an Islamic fanatic from the Army is an impossible task and must result in 24/7 supervision of all Muslims in the Army. Clearly given by what we know all it would have actually taken to stop Hasan is for someone in authority to take their blinders off, Hasan was practically begging to get weeded out. Yet if it had been an anti-government militia type guy in the Army and did the same thing, it’d be his ilk who’d write long articles about the culture of angry white men in the military. And if that guy had bypassed as many “red flags” as Hasan did they would point accusing fingers at the Army brass about condoning far right activism etc.
Chapman’s article is a slight improvement on the mainstream media’s general clap trap on the affair in the sense that he at least acknowledges the possibility the guy may have been an Islamist. But his hand-wringing about possible “overreaction” and the supposed impossibility of actually doing something about an outspoken Islamic fanatic without bringing all of democracy down is actually astonishing in its helplessness. It’s the castrated West at its most glaring.
Steele Phoenix wrote: “The same people who are cowering now didn’t seem to worry that starting two wars in the middle east and giving unconditional support to Israel were too big a terror risk.”
Unconditional support to Israel? Bush came into office demanding that a Palestinian [terror] state be constructed in Israel’s back yard. He continually pressured Israel to do more as it became obvious the Palis would do nothing to honor that stupid Road Map to Hell, or whatever it was called. The Bushies twisted arms to push Israel’s invertebrate leaders to give up Gaza (allowing Hamas rocket launchers to be moved up) and worked overtime to pressure Israel into both prisoner (terrorist) releases and kicking Jewish families out of their homes (about 22,000 of them) in the largest expropriation of Jewish property since Kristallnacht.
While arming virtually all of Israel’s (and the civilized world’s) enemies, Bush sent Condi Rice to Israel about once a month to throw a temper tantrum because some Jew in Jerusalem was adding a bathroom onto their domicile (“Settlement construction!!!”).
I won’t go into Sderot. Who cares about thousands of bombs being dropped on civilians or Bush’s constant admonition to Israel to not rock the peace boat?
Bush refused to move our embassy to Jerusalem. He wouldn’t consider a pardon for Jonathon Pollard. Both were at least considered by Clinton.
All of this was seen by the Bush administration as necessary to get “everyone” (Muslim countries) on board with the Iraq war. So your two great sins, Iraq/Afghanistan wars and support for Israel did not go hand in hand; they turned out to be (in deed if not in word) a contradiction for the brain-merchants around Bush.
And this constitutes unconditional support? Wow. I’m going to offer my two children unconditional support. I’m going to let the neighborhood bully kick the @#$% out of them. After that I’ll make a speech declaring my commitment to their well-being.
Don, you can hardly call something Jewish property when it isn’t on land they own. Israeli settlers on land that according to international law is not theirs increased by around 80,000 settlers under Bush, which is hardly ‘adding a bathroom’, nor does it make me think his rhetoric was anything but wind. Israel was ‘admonished’ but continued to do whatever they wanted, as they do today. Wow, I’m going to admonish my kids by giving them money and weapons to attack the neighbor kids while claiming I want them to all get along.
All of this is irrelevant to my point, which was perhaps insufficiently worded, but was that Islamic extremists are likely to consider the two wars and support for Israel to be far greater reasons to attack us than our ceasing to torture their people and instead putting them on trial. The point was one of perception from the point of view of those who would attack us, which seems a good place to look when trying to decide if they will.