Everyone Loves Gitmo

Well, not everyone. But 52% is a bare majority.

While Excitable Andy finds it gob-smackingly vile (of course) that most of us want to keep Gitmo open for business, he casts his disagreement in (of course, redux) the most emotion-laden of straw-man argument terms.

I don't support Gitmo and its practices primarily because I'm a fan of cruelty. Although, let me confess, I do take some pleasure in monsters being treated unkindly. I don't think I've ever cried that a child-rapist was himself raped in prison, or that a murdering bastard got shivved to death in the shower. I don't support rought tactics for punitive reasons; then again, I don't wring my hands about that incidental side-benefit.

It's important to keep Gitmo open for a lot of reasons. First of which-- being outside of America, it's partially immunized against court processes. I don't want judges setting the rules for treating illegal combatants and outright terrorist murderers; I'd rather have the military and some very tough-minded sonsabitches from the CIA doing so.

You've got to trust somebody. Somebody has to make the rules. Sorry, I trust the military and the right sort of CIA agent more on this point.

Second, we actually do need to engage in not-quite-dainty treatment of actual terrorists to compel them to answer questions they wouldn't otherwise answer. They hide amongst the civilian population, which is illegal; they are engaging in a criminal act simply by refusing to wear a uniform marking them as combatants. If we're to defeat this Army of Psychopathic Murder-Cultists, we need to be able to flush them out of their civilian-garb cover, and the only way to do that is to ask a captured, known terrorist who he works with, who he gets his supplies from, where he meets, whom he gives orders to, and (especially) who he takes orders from.

Excitable Andy and Dick Durbin have no alternate plan as to how we can accomplish this obviously-critical goal. Obviously, they believe it's not so critical at all, and we should just abandon it as a goal if it means we have to stoop to playing loud rap music in a terrorist's cell; but they're very cagey about actually saying so.

Admitting their precious little consciences are more important than saving human lives and capturing more terrorists would be counterproductive to their main goal of getting attention and nice reviews from left-wing publications.

Third-- if we shut down Gitmo, where the hell do we put them? Not America, certainly; we'd just have to find another base similarly removed from actual American soil and warehouse them there. And what the hell good would that accomplish?

And finally-- terrorists are actually afraid of Gitmo. To this extent, Excitable Andy and Dick Durbin are doing us an actual accidental solid, by frightening terrorists about the "horrors" they'll encounter there.

posted by Ace at 03:15 PM

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