Ex-Gitmo detainee reportedly gets al-Qaida role

[Naked Gents Rut]

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday shrugged off Republican suggestions that the federal government reopen Alcatraz prison in her San Francisco district to house detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President Obama this week signed an executive order calling for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo within the year. Republican Rep. Bill Young then suggested to White House counsel Greg Craig that the prisoners who could not be released back to their home countries or sent to a third country be put up in "the Rock," the famous military installation and prison that closed down in 1963 and is now part of the National Park Service.

Asked whether that was a serious proposal, Pelosi said, "It is -- no."

"Perhaps he's not visited Alcatraz," Pelosi said of Young while displaying little sense of humor. "Alcatraz is a tourist attraction. It's a prison that is now sort of like a -- it's a national park."

That explanation didn't stop House Minority Leader John Boehner from repeating the suggestion on Sunday, making that point that closing down Guantanamo by year's end may not be the best plan considering the recidivism rate of terrorist detainees is about 12 percent.

"If liberals believe they ought to go, maybe we ought to open Alcatraz," Boehner, R-Ohio, told NBC "Meet the Press." Being reminded that Alcatraz is a national park, Boehner responded, "It's very secure."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/25/pelosi-shrugs-alcatraz-possible-terror-detention-facility/

Boehner

[Ramo]

Turning a tourist attraction into a detention facility because Republicans endow terrorists with magical powers would be retarded.

[Naked Gents Rut]

Alcatraz is the most secure prison site in the United States. Putting the detainees there would also give them access to the most friendly circuit court in the country for their hearings and would prevent them from getting murdered by the AB in Leavenworth. It's a great idea.

[Ramo]

A large proportion of the enemy combatants held in Gitmo never committed a crime. They were in Afghanistan (or elsewhere) fighting for [...] Al Qaeda, but had never committed a terrorist act against the United States.

Do you honestly believe that's the scope of US criminal jurisdiction?

[Naked Gents Rut]

I love that people like you have a problem with following the letter of the Geneva Convention as it regards non-uniformed combatants, but have no problem labeling any soldier that fights against the United States a "criminal". The perversion of the rules of war that's been going on for the last few years years is amazing...

[Darius871]

See, here's the point -- and I think we agree on this. Closing Gitmo has nothing to do with whether prisoners are going to be set free, which seems to be Slowwy's concern. Regardless of whether Gitmo closes, prisoners who can't be held there, thanks to Boumediene, have to be set free regardless. Prisoners who can still be held there can also be held elsewhere. The closing of Gitmo is irrelevant from a US security standpoint, but a huge win from a public diplomacy standpoint, which is why closing it is a no-brainer.

...

But, as I said, whatever happened with al-Shahri -- who I'm sure is an evil-hearted little sh!t, regardless of what he did -- has got f*ck-all to do with Obama and with closing Gitmo.

I do agree to the extent that closing Gitmo in particular has no negative impact (except perhaps the tremendous expense of wasting what is physically a perfectly good enclosure to move the same bodies to different enclosures which are typically overcrowded and would need the additional expense of expansion, but who really cares about taxpayer dollars when we can make people feel warm and fuzzy inside about "symbols"?), and although there is no "gain" in actual justice (since Boumediene leveled a forest in pointing out why the Constitution applies just as much to nominally non-sovereign leased land in Gitmo as it would to a Norfolk naval brig), there is at least something to gain from a PR standpoint, so it's a no-brainer in that sense.

Still, Gitmo's not the only issue. As a "symbolic gesture" it's taken by many, including probably Slowwy, as a harbinger of an overall policy shift toward starting to give GWOT detainees some modicum of constitutional due process beyond what the bare-minimum laws of war would require. Regardless of what you or I subjectively find "just" or not in terms of fundamental human rights, we must both admit that the more substantive and procedural rights a non-citizen detainee has in the process of challenging whether his detention was justified, the more often people will be released who are in fact unabashed terrorists despite inadequate evidence or improper process. That net result is absolutely inevitable, just as it's inevitable that broadening or narrowing the 4th Amendment directly causes more or less murderers, rapists, drug dealers, etc. to go free. The fact that the District Court on remand from Boumediene freed 5 of the 6 petitioners in November makes this obvious.

Granted Obama hasn't gotten definitive on whether military commissions of any kind will continue nor on just what procedural rules, rules of evidence, controlling substantive law, standards of proof, etc. etc. etc. will be used, whether entirely by his choice in modified military commissions (which remain mostly under executive control) should they continue, or by statutory direction (which he could probably get Congress to do on favorable terms) if he decides to close the commissions and this moves into regular courts of the D.C. Circuit. There hasn't been time for that yet. But I do think both his statements on the campaign trail and intense pressure from his constituency make it highly likely that detainees will soon have more leniency when it comes to challenging their detentions. That equals "some" more freed terrorists, like al-Shihri, than otherwise.

Hence, the real issue is whether it's worthwhile to inevitably set "some" actual terrorists free - adding slightly to the risk that civilians of various nationalities will die and adding greatly to the risk that U.S. and Iraqi soldiers will die - in the name of "justice" for its own sake. Personally I'm willing to take that risk because quite frankly any increase in freedom is likely to be at the cost of human life (blood is liberty's "natural manure" as Jefferson put it), which is why we already take that risk regarding epidemic criminality, but if someone like Slowwy thinks the price is too high, I at least understand the viewpoint.

As for al-Shahri, he's just another aspect of the Bushies' monumental f*ck-up of the War on Terror; if they'd used foresight instead of arrogance and a titanic sense of their own righteousness (or maybe if they'd just employed more real lawyers and fewer graduates of Holy Blood of Christ Law School and Grill), they could and should have predicted the strong possibility that the Court wasn't going to uphold indefinite detention, and they could have avoided handing Al-Qaeda a public relations coup.

I don't accept that at all. Boumediene was decided 5-4 with strong arguments on both sides of what were first-time ambiguities, and Kennedy was the tie-breaking wild card as usual, so it was far from predictable. For crying out loud, even freaking Scalia surprisingly led the freedom-loving side of Hamdi (arguing in dissent that there existed no constitutional or statutory power for Bush to detain absent either suspension of habaeus corpus or a normal criminal trial), so nothing was predictable about where the scale would tip on this topic.

That aside, I fail to see how Boumediene even nears a PR coup for al-Qaeda anyway. How many average Americans have even heard of it, let alone on the Arab street? I also fail to see how the case's crack legal team led by Paul Clement (a magna *** laude Harvard graduate, Supreme Court Editor of the Harvard Law Review, partner of a top-10 law firm, and Chief Counsel for the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, etc. etc. etc.) has anything to do with low-level idiots like Monica Goodling. Titanic constitutional clashes like this one, and policy-advising predictions of their outcomes, only come from the best of the best with the backup of assistance from private firms as well as piles and piles of amicus curiae briefs from non-parties. We're not dealing with amateurs here.

[SlowwHand]

I'm still waiting for some country to take them. I guess outrage only goes so far.

[Naked Gents Rut]

The leaders of other countries aren't stupid, even if the populace they govern might be.

[Ramo]

I love that people like you have a problem with following the letter of the Geneva Convention as it regards non-uniformed combatants, but have no problem labeling any soldier that fights against the United States a "criminal".

Yes, AQ is just like every other organization fighting against the US.

[SlowwHand]

What's your point, Ramo? Do you understand what was said?

[Naked Gents Rut]

Yes, AQ is just like every other organization fighting against the US.

What about Taliban fighters?

[Ramo]

They're different, obviously. That's why I quoted the AQ part. What you're saying is delusional.

[Naked Gents Rut]

I mentioned both the Taliban and AQ. I take it you can't counter my overall point.

[Darius871]

I love that people like you have a problem with following the letter of the Geneva Convention as it regards non-uniformed combatants, but have no problem labeling any soldier that fights against the United States a "criminal". The perversion of the rules of war that's been going on for the last few years years is amazing...

Or I could just be consistent by believing the entirety of the Geneva Convention is based on an obsolete conception of war and should be completely revamped. Step one: recognize that wars between sovereign states end and therefore treaties take care of what happens to enemy combatants, whereas suppression of nebulous terrorist or rebel forces have potentially indefinite timeframes that result in potentially indefinite detentions, which necessitates a separate process for assessing their "guilt." With or without a fifth convention, the Congress, President, and courts have the power to fashion that process however they damn well please so long as its rights are equal to or in excess of those granted by the fourth convention. This isn't an international law question but a policy question: what process do we want?

[Ramo]

I mentioned both the Taliban and AQ. I take it you can't counter my overall point.

What overall point? Members of the Taliban by and large don't fall under US criminal jurisdiction, unless they were involved in a terrorist action.

So you can't defend your ridiculous assertion. Glad we have that straight.