Listening to the various hysterical declarations about the impending release of the prisoner from Guantanamo Bay has made me wonder: When did we Americans become a bunch of bed-wetting, teddy bear needing, blanket clutching crybabies?

For cripes sake, there were actual National Socialists soldiers in POW camps in the US during WWII and the American people carried about our actual daily activities. The mere idea that an accused terrorist (mind you, not actually convicted of terrorism, but merely accused) might show up in their states has some congressional Republicans carrying on in near hysterics about how dangerous it would be and declaring that these accused people would never be allowed in their districts. For an example of the kind of argument we’re dealing with consider this:

First, not all dangerous men are the same. It’s hard to picture militia members, the Crips, Bloods, or what have you doing something as extreme as, say, crashing a plane into the prison to facilitate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren.

For those who say, “oh, these detainees will never escape, it would be maximum security,” it happened from the prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Another breakout in an Afghan prison freed 400 captured Taliban. In Yemen, captured al-Qaeda broke out, possibly with help from the inside. We’ve seen captured al-Qaeda escape from prisons in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. And Morocco. An al-Qaeda plotter escaped from a Pakistani prison, and other attempts to break them out have been foiled.

But Appel writes, “And how housing detainees in maximum security prisons impacts the American citizens residing nearby is beyond me.” You would think one might be familiar with escapes of violent and in some cases, death row criminals from high or maximum-security facilities in New Mexico, Louisiana, Texas (more than once), Virginia, Iowa, South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Pennsylvania…

Appel asks me, “What do we gain by keeping detainees at Gitmo?” The answer is, “the assurance that they will not harm Americans further, even if they manage to escape” — a scenario that has not happened yet. The nation may decide that factor is not paramount, but it’s not something to dismiss, either.

The same assurance cannot be provided by domestic prisons. Or, you know, we could trade this assurance for some “symbolic” benefit that Appel deems paramount, and he rather blithely admits, “Trying detainees won’t appear legitimate unless we bring them under the American system, and if we do that some very bad men will go free.”

Will go free… and go back to their life’s mission, killing Americans. But that’s okay; in exchange for your life, Appel and those like him will no longer have to live with the disapproving words of Le Monde.

* From Congresswoman Lynn Jenkins, whose district includes Leavenworth: “Sherman Army Airfield, adjacent to Fort Leavenworth, is too small for military aircraft, which would require the suspected terrorists to be transported through Kansas City International Airport.” But hey, why worry about these kinds of details; there’s symbolism at stake!

What a pants wetting boob.

Well here’s my thing: I’m not afraid of these people. The prisoners in Gitmo may be hostile (and if I’d been kept in Gitmo for seven years, tortured and otherwise mistreated I’d be hostile too). But that’s not the point.

They’re not scary. I say we rent Oxbow jail to the federal government. Hell, we can staff it and manage it for a fee, it creates some jobs in Salt Lake. We get them access to you know, due process. If they are accused of a crime, they should be tried in a court of law, with legal representation, actual evidence, and a judge. As Glenn Greenwald points out:

As it turned out, of course, hundreds of the detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo when that 2004 Op-Ed was published — ones which most of the country was calling “Terrorists” — weren’t “Terrorists” at all. They were guilty of absolutely nothing. In fact, the Bush administration subsequently acknowledged as much by eventually releasing hundreds of them — after they had been put in cages for years with no trial of any kind. There still continues to be grave doubts about the guilt of many of the remaining detainees, including ones that have been there for years and are probably irrevocably broken as human beings.

From Tapped:

But just so we’re clear, even convicted terrorists have the right not to be physically or mentally abused to the point of insanity. If we can’t understand that due process is part of the fundamental human decency that separates us from them, then I don’t really know what we’re fighting for. It’s certainly not a free and just society, because that doesn’t exist without due process of law.

Of course, due process is going to be a nightmare. Wanna guess why?

If your first guess was Bush incompetence, you’re right on the first try:

President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration’s focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Okay so get this right. The Bushies screwed up so bad they don’t have the actual information in a usable form – guess what? That means they have never had a single f-ing clue about the actual facts concerning any of the prisoners. Guilty, not guilty, wrong place wrong time, no idea. From McJoan at Kos:

Just let that bolded part sink in a bit. Detention and interrogation (read, “torture”) were a higher priority than figuring out which cases actually merited prosecution. In other words, locking them up and torturing them was more important than determining if they were actually guilty and prosecuting them for their crimes. Nothing that BushCo did should come as a surprise at this point, but that the Bush Pentagon wasn’t even able to do one thing that the military has always been able to do–bureaucracy–is dumbfounding.

So even if we want to actually you know, provide due process we can’t. In the meantime, as a matter of US integrity, we have to close Gitmo, we have to treat the prisoners there humanely, we have to behave like Americans. The problem with the Bushie plan to imprison and interrogate was twofold – a) doesn’t work so well b) it was an attack on the integrity of the American people. We have been degraded by their actions, we have been complicit in committing evil.
Digby:

The administration wanted to “send a message” by creating a myth that they were omnipotent gods who were capturing all the “bad guys,” giving them drugs and forced enemas and putting them in a concentration camp. But it was, like most Mayberry Machiavelli marketing, not reality. There is very little “evidence” and a whole lot of hype. They did use a flurry of useless paperwork as their “metric” in the early years, but it was all derived from torture, threats and lies.

The politics of this were never going to be easy for the president. The right is prepared to call him a terrorist sympathizer no matter what he does, short of keeping Guantanamo open indefinitely and going back on his promise to end torture. He might as well rip off the band-aid on this stuff. It isn’t going to get any easier — and there are actual human beings’ lives hanging in the balance.

It would appear that people like Geoffrey Miller, Barbara Fast, Dick Cheney, Stephen Cambone, Paul Wolfowitz and others are all going to sail into history unpunished for their records on torture. They are walking around free. The least we can do is give their former prisoners a trial as soon as possible or let them go.

So that gets me back to Oxbow. We’re not talking about super-geniuses. We’re not talking about super-villains. We’re talking about people broken by years of mistreatment. We as a nation for the sake of our souls need to make right – at least try to make right – that which we made wrong. Bring them to Oxbow, get an Imam from the local community to lead their religious services, treat them with dignity and respect, sufficient food and clothing and medical care. Give them enough room to talk about, to be human beings. Get them inside a courtroom and give them a fair trial – we can hold it at Oxbow if need be but god-damn it get some attorneys for them, show some evidence. It’s not about them, it’s about us and our national identity and integrity.