I've mostly avoided politics on this blog for some time. (Yeah, yeah, I drew a comparison between Dick Cheney and Darth Sidious, but I hardly consider that a controversial link.) But apparently President Obama's decision to shut down Gitmo as a prison/torture palace has rankled some of my more deranged neighbors, and so I thought it time to call them over for a little chat.
Matt Yglesias accurately sums up the reason why Bush and company chose to house prisoners in Cuba:
[T]he appeal of the location was its ambiguous legal status. Guantanamo Bay is in Cuba, not the United States of America. But since the Cuban Revolution of 1958, we’ve had no Status of Forces Agreement with Cuba authorizing the presence of an American military base. Consequently, argued the Bush administration, neither Cuban nor American law applied there. This was somewhat daft if you ask me, albeit clever, but whatever you think of the merits of the argument that is why the prisoners were sent there. The Bush team never felt it was unsafe to send prisoners to Fort Leavenworth or to the supermax prison in Colorado, they just didn’t want to be in a position where they had to follow the law.
Still, there are people on this planet who argue, with apparent seriousness, that keeping the prisoners currently in Cuba in a modern U.S. Federal Prison is so dangerous that we must, instead, house these uniquely terrifying prisoners on an island far away and beyond the law. These people have fallen into the trap of thinking that, because a group of criminals manage to pull of a spectacular crime, they must be spectacularly brilliant criminals. But mobsters, terrorists, and free lance killers didn't get into the business they're in because astrophysics, brain surgery, and law school didn't appeal to them. A small percentage of them actually have brains, but most of them don't, just like the rest of us.
The 9/11 attackers weren't geniuses. They had a workable idea, the element of surprise, a decent command of English, the ability to keep their mouths shut, and a willingness to die for the cause. This puts them far ahead of the idiot who tried to detonate his shoe, or the nimrods who thought they could mix explosives in an airplane bathroom. Still, it doesn't make the 9/11 terrorists into the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and it doesn't make Osama into Magneto. They, and their brethren in the cause, are ordinary guys, with ordinary competencies and defects. We should be no more frightened of them than we are of drug dealers, mobsters, or our own domestic terrorists, for whom maximum security federal prisons are home. If we can trust the Supermax in Colorado to hold the Unabomber, the remaining Oklahoma City bomber, the first World Trade Center bombers, and Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, I think we can fell safe about its handling whoever we pick up in Afghanistan.
