Asking Why?

Why? Is there really any good reason why? What is the gain?

My conclusion is that there is none. It is pure and simple political posturing. I'm talking here about Club Gitmo. What do we gain by closing the detention facility at Quantanamo?

Let's review. The facility is in a US military installation which is isolated on the island of Cuba. It is in place, running and fully operational. It houses about 225 terrorists captured in the war on terror, mostly in Afghanistan. It has been inspected by outside agencies and reports indicate it is secure, clean, disciplined and effective. It is extremely safe with regard to the security of the United States.

Through an organized policy of insinuation, innuendo and sensationalism, the facility has been characterized as a New World Inquisition with torture chambers, and the full auto-de-fe treatment. President Obama campaigned on a promise to immediately shut it down and let these poor oppressed Muslims go home. He still points to his first week in office executive order shutting the facility by January 2010. He boasted of it last week in his UN apology and surrender speech.

The problem is that these 225 thugs are seriously dangerous people. They aren't white-collar criminals or minority pot smokers. They are terrorists, trained in mass destruction and dedicated to the collapse of America. If you release them they will return to killing Americans. Even their home nations don't want them back. You can't repatriate them.

What to do? How do you fulfill a promise to do something stupid that didn't need doing in the first place and which can't be done without making us less secure?

It looks as though they are going to bring them to America.

Finalists Emerging on American Gulag

Now, I've seen Super Max. It is just off US 50 in Colorado between Pueblo and Canon City. It is in an area in which prisons are a growth industry. There you'll find a Colorado Women's Prison, another Federal prison, the original Colorado Territorial Prison (still in use), a major juvenile facility and more. They could handle the job, but you would lose the isolation of the jihadi terrorist population and the focus of the intelligence operations. You would be simply warehousing in solitary confinement.

How about those "military brigs"? Leavenworth is a true prison, but most military detention facilities aren't suitable for maximum security imprisonment. They are wooden barracks with chain link and concertina wire around them. They house AWOLs and hub-cap thieves, not terrorists.

What will be improved? They will now be on US soil. If they escape they won't be on an island nor will they be in Castro's communist paradise. They will be in our backyard.

The next step after they are on US soil will be the ACLU and fellow-travelers society extending habeus corpus, bleating about Constitutional rights, demands for federal trials with full disclosure and compromise of our intelligence capabilities which have already been seriously impaired.

Why? Why? Why?