Excerpt Of The Day: The Foolishness Of Closing Gitmo

15 Jun, 2005 by John Hawkins

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“Senator Joe Biden said that while we should close Gitmo and release the occupants, we should also “keep those we have reason to keep.” Huh? This is the logical equivalent of Solomon saying, “Hey, let’s cut the baby in half after all.” Imagine if, instead of Gitmo, the issue was the death penalty. “The death penalty should be abolished, but let’s execute the folks there’s a reason to execute.”

If we kept the ones “we have reason to keep” – which would probably mean all 500 or so current detainees – but closed Gitmo, we could bring them to the United States. But this would be a legal quagmire, as it isn’t clear what their rights would be on U.S. soil. And it would be a disaster to treat them like common criminals with all of the usual constitutional rights. Nobody read these murderers their rights when they were seized in Afghanistan, and it’s not like the cast of “CSI: Kabul” or “Kandahar PD Blue” collected all the necessary forensic evidence to build a case against them. Does that mean we should just let them go? We certainly can’t set them free on American soil. And if we send them back to Afghanistan or Pakistan, it would be like giving them a do-over.

Any new Gitmo would quickly gain the same reputation as the old one because a) al-Qaida is under strict orders to allege all manner of abuses for propaganda purposes, especially now that such tactics have proved so useful, and b) because the “international community” and other lovers of runny cheese desperately want such allegations to be true, regardless of the evidence. That the head of Amnesty International could call Gitmo, where we spend more money on the care and feeding of detainees than we do on our own troops, the “Gulag of our time” is all the evidence we need for that. Caving into such bullying would send the unmistakable message that American can be rolled.” — Jonah Goldberg