Investing Terrorists With Super-Human Capabilities

Today's Wall Street Journal article entitled 'The Gitmo Distraction', by David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey (Justice Dept. veterans from the 80's) illustrates just how pathetic the Bush Administration has been in its approach towards handling Al Qaeda terrorists.

The problem is that the Bushies are scared witless by these terrorists, even if the terrorists are naked and folded pretzel-like into stress positions on waterboards and have been kept up all night listening to deafening Metallica and AC/DC riffs and fishing their Korans out of chamberpots. Apparently the terrorists have special intelligence that never ages, no matter how many years they spend behind bars, and special skills, like being able to read minds, expose military secrets, and corrupt the entire American judicial system with impertinent requests for habeas corpus. The Bushies have no faith at all in the American judicial system's capability of judging their cases. It makes you wonder why anyone would bother defending something called America justice at all, given these insecurities. It makes you yearn for the confident leadership of the sort that won World War II, rather than the modern sort that runs scared from ghosts like discovery and due process....

Look, you are the jailers, not the jailed. Osama bin Laden is not Spiderman. None of his followers have magical powers. Cut them; they bleed. Imprison terrorists indefinitely, they go nuts. Same goes with kidnappees that were sold to us in Afghanistan for bounties and might not belong to Al Qaeda at all. They all have cases that need ajudication under laws recognizable to civilized people. Decide these cases, and move on. This indefinite postponement of War on Terror decisions does no one any favors, least of all, ourselves. Inventing legal proceedings out of John Yoo's fervid unitary-executive imagination does not speed things along, either: it does just the opposite. So, stop doing it. If appropriate laws aren't available, get Congress to act. Above all, act humanely. Hiding and torturing people in Gitmo is dark, shameful, and advances no war goals.

Examples from this lame, fearful article:

From the start of this conflict, al Qaeda's strategy has been to take maximum advantage of Western sensibilities and institutions, including public opinion and legal rules which limit what states can do in their own defense....Detaining captured al Qaeda and Taliban operatives as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay was, and remains, a central aspect of [Bush Administration wartime paradigm] policy and there is little doubt that abandoning it will be seen by al Qaeda as a failure of American nerve and a vindication of their strategic vision.

This is raw fear masquerading as analysis. There is no evidence for such far-sighted strategic thinking by Al Qaeda, and much evidence to argue the opposite. 9/11, for example, was not a brilliant public relations maneuver for Al Qaeda in the West.

...[B]ringing the detainees into the U.S. also would be no panacea. This too would be costly, involving creation of new maximum-security prison space in an already overcrowded federal system.

We are spending ten billion dollars a month, just in Iraq. Tossing in a fancy prison for a hundred million dollars, something that might save our worldwide reputation (the real source of our international power) is something we can easily afford - chump change, actually.

And what if the courts rule that classified information must be revealed to guarantee a fair trial? Oh! The horror! Why it's 'damaging the war effort'! We'll be defeated because secrets about what brand of handcuffs we use will be revealed!

Look, a prisoner mop-up operation is not the same as the Manhattan Project. Have some perspective, and some sense, about what 'classified' information is all about, and what can be revealed to secure a conviction. If Valerie Plame's identity can be revealed without caring the least bit for the consequences, so too can details about American soldiers arresting people in Afghanistan.

And what about our fickle allies? Lies about what they want are helpful....

However, Europe's real objection is not to the detainees' location at a U.S. naval base in Cuba, but to their confinement as enemy combatants in the first place. By and large, Europe has never accepted that there is a "war" on terror. Moving detainees to Afghanistan or the U.S. will not change this.

Since Europe has been the site of many Al Qaeda terrorist efforts, the Europeans most certainly understand and support the concept of detaining terrorists. What Europeans object to is the torture of suspects, abandoning more than a century of hard-won Geneva Convention progress, and the surrender of human rights available to detainees even during the worst of the Middle Ages, available even when Hitler was in power. Europeans have hard experience watching dictatorships strip their citizens of rights, and that's what they see here - a new Orwellian American Fascism that will eventually threaten them as well.

Rivkin and Casey are such cowards. If they fear American Law, no wonder they can't defeat terrorists, even disoriented terrorists on hunger strikes. Call your pliable Congress persons and get them to help with what you can't find in the law. Make some phone calls. Even call a few Democrats. They are nice people, and won't bite. If these political windvanes won't help, however, then maybe there is something wrong about what you want in the first place....

Wanna scare a Bushie lawyer? Just say "The Hague".

Boo!