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Hyperventilating Over Gitmo

Driving down the blistering New Jersey turnpike Thursday from New England I had plenty of time to immerse myself in the AM right wing radio talker mash, which seems to be bordering on apoplexy these days over a prospective Obama presidency. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees their day in civilian […]

Driving down the blistering New Jersey turnpike Thursday from New England I had plenty of time to immerse myself in the AM right wing radio talker mash, which seems to be bordering on apoplexy these days over a prospective Obama presidency. The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow Guantanamo Bay detainees their day in civilian court, announced earlier Thursday, was met with similar hyperbolic gyrations.

Talk Show hosts Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh referred to the (not Right, but wrong) half of the court as “radical leftists,” representing an extreme movement of socialists (Obama supporters, all) who want to, in the words of Limbaugh, take the authority to prosecute war “away from the commander-in-chief,” and give it “to themselves.” Hannity referred to the court’s decision as making it easier for terrorists to come to “our towns.”

That indeed was a familiar refrain following the decision. In fact, Justice Antonin Scalia, in his own dissent, said “[the decision] will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.”

Presumptive Republican nominee and former POW John McCain seemed oblivious to the ironies as he “condemned” the SCOTUS decision as one of the worst “in the history of this country.” According to The Wall Street Journal, McCain excoriated the court in a New Jersey “town hall meeting” (no doubt the kind he had in mind for himself and Obama):

“These are enemy combatants, these are people who are not citizens, they are not and never have been given the rights that the citizens of this country have,” he said. “Our first obligation is the safety and security of this nation and the men and women who defend it.”

The rowdy crowd rose to a standing ovation.

Online, the pajamahadeen were just as melodramtic. Hugh Hewitt, in an interview with Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., said, “[the decision] doesn’t release any terrorists, though I think we’re coming close to the day that a district court somewhere tells a killer he gets to go free from Gitmo, I don’t know where, to South Florida. But what do you do now?”

An honest discussion without the lizard brain hysterics would be a good start. Maybe stop assuming Americans are a bunch of lunkheads who cannot appreciate a complex situation in which hundreds of suspected criminals, of multiple ethnic and national origins, captured on a global battlefield that spans Afghanistan to Bosnia, in circumstances and for crimes still unknown to us — to even themselves — are imprisoned without charge for years on an island that may or may not be under the purview of the US constitution.

Hannity and Limbaugh like to talk about all the “terrorists” at Gitmo. But what is becoming clearer by day is that some 190 out of the 270 detainees there will eventually be released because after six years of whatever kind of interrogations they endured (we may never know, as reports this week indicate that federal agents were directed by the Pentagon to destroy their notes on individual interrogations) there isn’t enough evidence to charge them with terrorism against the US. No, they won’t be let out at a bus depot in Miami, but to authorities in their home countries, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia or whatever third country will take them. If the past is any indication, these “repatriated” men will likely be set free soon after.

Numerous reports have already pointed out that many of Guantanamo’s luckless prisoners were sent there under circumstantial evidence supplied by resentful, greedy foes, mistaken identity, flimsy ties. That’s why many of them — some 500 — were already quietly released over the last few years. Some, where extremist tendencies were proven, were “rehabilitated” in Saudi Arabia, others just set back on the streets.

Still others, like the 17 Chinese Muslims who had nothing to do with 9/11 or fighting Americans — in fact, the military agrees they are innocent — are among those still languishing at Guantanamo Bay. According to The Los Angeles Times, 70 detainees today, like the Chinese, are cleared to go now but no one will take them or ensure they won’t be harmed when they step off the plane.

Gitmo appears to be a place of ambiguities on a grand, tragic scale. It might be that only the detainees and their jailers know what goes on there. We know now that the US Supreme Court believes it is unconstitutional for these men, some after six years, not be able to contest their detentions in an open court court of law.

The National Review does not agree. Here’s law expert Peter Wehner:

But if one is going to invent Constitutional rights out of thin air, it’s worth asking: What moral universe do Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Stephens, and Souter inhabit when they are willing to manufacture constitutional rights for unlawful enemy combatants who want to slit the throats and watch innocent Americans bleed and die while at the same time uphold manufactured constitutional rights that allow people to abort innocent unborn children?

There are some 80 “high-profile” prisoners are Gitmo (only 19 of them have so far been cleared for prosecution) — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed comes to mind — who no doubt belong in US custody and may never again see the light of day. If the cases against these men — several of whom are accused of links to the 9/11 hijackers — are as good as we are led to believe, that will be assured, and there won’t be any blood flowing on Main Street as a result of Thursday’s decision.

But the decision may afford those deemed innocent during their detentions an eventual ticket home and off the American conscience for good. Thursday’s ruling doesn’t automatically set these men free, it only allows them to contest their detentions, in a federal process that has yet to be defined and could mean many more years of bureaucratic red tape and confinement.

The glare of sunlight could mean all the difference, however. Secretary of Defense Gates suggests himself that the process up until now has been flawed, eager as he is to tell audiences he wants to shut Gitmo down.

I’m no naif — perhaps the SCOTUS decision, which now threatens to thwart the now- constitutionally questionable military tribunals set up by the Bush administration and a hamstrung congress, will force the government to close Gitmo and take the whole thing underground, relying on renditions to countries and prisons the US law can’t reach. Leave it to Limbaugh to have puzzled this through and is ready to blame the “drive by” media for not allowing renditions to work either:

There is a reaction for every action, and what this means is don’t capture ’em. And if you’re going to rendition ’em — and, by the way, that’s something started by Bill Clinton in the mid-nineties, rendition is where you send these people to unknown locations where they are held captive by the leaders of those nations who are your allies. Of course, an eager beaver press will be eager to find out where these prisoners have been taken as long as there’s a Republican president.

The moral of this story is going to shake out this way. Take no captives. This is a victory for the enemy.

The right wing talkers have wedded the very idea of a Democratic presidency — particularly an Obama one — with the loss of limitless executive power, thus the unusual desperation in their attacks. When Limbaugh headlines his online rant, “The Last Days of the United States,” one has to ask just whose country is he talking about?

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