Still Wetting Themselves
by Brien Jackson
I really don’t get the right’s approach to Guantanamo Bay. You’d think they’d take the opportunity of a popular President closing the place down to let that little nagging issue fade off into the background with little fanfare. Instead they seem bound and determined to remind everyone why they don’t like Republicans, and that for all their bluster about how terrorists can “bring it on,” they’re really nothing more than very scared, very irrational babies. Like monsters under the bed afraid. Take Jim Geraghty’s argument for keeping detainees in Guantanamo Bay:
The options discussed so far are right next to a nuclear power plant in Southern California, right next to the facility for educational and training programs for foreign military students at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas*, and right in the middle of northern Charleston, South Carolina, three miles or so from an airport.
If a detainee were to escape Guantanamo Bay, they would have the option of running to Cubans or sharks, and getting roughly the same warm welcome from both. A detainee who escapes from any of the U.S. sites is within quick reach of terror targets, potential hostages, means of escape, etc.
Can someone explain to me how, exactly, someone is going to bust out of a maximum security prison in, one assumes, a prison issued orange jumpsuit, without any money, unarmed, etc., and then proceed to blow up a nuclear power plant? It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like Geraghty’s been watching too much Burn Notice or something and he imagines that these detainees are some sort of amazingly sophisticated, highly trained, fighting machine. But let’s be honest, they’re not. They use IED’s and suicide attacks for crying out loud, not exactly the kind of thing you see former SEALS do on teevee.
Geraghty goes on:
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 faciliate an escape and/or provide martyrdom to their brethren.
The blind sheik has been in US prison for a decade without any attempt to spring him or “martyr” him. And again, the problem is that Geraghty just isn’t operating out of the real world. Ultimately al Qaeda is much like the mob, and there’s no honor among thieves. Bin Laden doesn’t give a damn about Khalid Muhammed or any other of his minions, they’re all expendable. But that doesn’t jive with Geraghty’s conception of these people as crazy radicals motivated by insane religion representing a highly sophisticated existential threat to the United States. And the problem isn’t that Geraghty and the rest of the right are stupid, per se, it’s simply that they’re not operating from reality. Instead, they’re working out of a right-wing cocoon where all of this nonsense is accepted as a given and never challenged.
After all, they think Jack Bauer is real.
Tags: Wingnuts
January 26th, 2009 at 1:24 PM
I think people are unaware how incompetent most terrorists are, even Al Qaeda.
It’s because they spent the last eight years trying to make AQ the new Soviets.
January 26th, 2009 at 4:29 PM
I don’t think they’re incompetent. Their strategy for their desired goal (getting the US out of the Middle East so that bin Laden can wage a personal jihad on the Saudis) seems about as sound as it’s going to get. What I do think is that the right-wing has worked themselves into such a lather over “terrorists” that they’ve almost become a self-parody. Let’s be honest, what Geraghty’s “they might blow up a nuclear power plant if they escape” theory rests on is the idea that these guys are supervillians with some sort of super powers. It’s not based in reality and, the luck that went into pulling off 9/11 not withstanding, these guys are going to be small fries by the standards of our maximum security prisons. Not to sterotype, but seriously, who would you be more afraid of running into in a dark alley; Mohammed Atta or a Columbian drug cartel’s hitman?