Al Qaeda--Now Play Nice

Obama has vowed to shut Guantanamo’s prison down. He has also pledged no more torture. California’s Willie Brown says that this is the price of democracy—we cannot stop someone until he has actually committed a criminal act. We have to wait until he actually kills someone.
Um hmm. Carry that argument to its logical conclusion: if an F-16 had had one of the airliners that flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11 in his sights, would we have required that he hold fire until the plane actually flew into the building? So says Willie Brown, purporting to speak for Obama.
Or, what if we knew in advance that the planes were going to destroy something, somewhere—but we didn’t know exactly what or where? What if we had captured one of the terrorists in the airport? Would we eschew all forms of pain inducing tactics to convince the prisoner to tell us exactly where the target was so that we could stop the attack?
I heard a television guest commentator today assert that we cannot violate the Constitution, that Barrack Obama will find a way to get them to talk without torture of any kind. If that’s possible, we’d better dig up the bones of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR and burn them for their violations of the document.
Lincoln threw out Habeas Corpus (a vital Constitutional right) and imprisoned anybody, anywhere without proof or process. Roosevelt absolutely shredded (he didn’t violate; he shredded) all laws of neutrality on the high seas—ordering neutral American warships into hostile waters with orders to shoot on sight. The “good Rueben James” opened fire first. The U-boat was defending itself.
Under Wilson, German and Dutch speaking (they sound a lot alike even though Holland was neutral) got a lot of privacy violating scrutiny during World War I. Union organizers and protestors went to jail. There were threats that German/Dutch speakers would be denied the “civil protection of the law”.
But, you say, that was wartime. In war you even hire Mafia hit men to teach OSS assassins how to kill with Tommy Guns. Isn’t it war when whole nations open up camps to teach terrorists how to kill Americans and Europeans? Or is this something more innocent like gaming on computers?
Another commentator made a point today. If you shut Guantanamo down, what do you do with some really dangerous people locked up there?
(Let me make a point here. I’ve ridden with police officers; I’ve known several. They can take you through your neighborhood and point out the muggers and thieves. Why don’t they arrest them? No evidence that will stand up in court. All they can do is wait until somebody commits a serious enough crime so that there’s DNA evidence and witnesses talk—and then, after the fact, they can arrest.)
Same problem at Guantanamo. Where do you send the really dangerous types that you don’t have enough formal evidence to convict? Shall we deport them to another nation that’s likely to release them in a year or two? How many dead Americans might that cause?
Someone today pointed out that no Congressman calling for closing Guantanamo has volunteered to accept any of the prisoners in HIS district
Then comes the question of non-lethal torture, the kind that doesn’t maim or disfigure. Oh no, we can’t do that. Inhumane. Violates Geneva. (So does flying a plane into a building full of civilians in “peace time”.) Let me offer some practical reality for a second.
We took pain inducing tactics out of our schools years ago. What do we have now? We have buildings full of kids who feel free to do everything from pouring urine into heat vents to slashing tires. If a school official so much as walks toward them, the instantaneous response is “You can’t touch me!”
He’s right. We can’t. The worst thing we can do to the kid is send him home to watch TV and play video games for a few days. You can’t even threaten to keep him after school—he might miss his bus and have to walk home.
To keep some semblance of order (I’m talking suburban schools), we have armed police walking the halls. Take away the paddle and you can’t keep sixteen year old American kids in line. Ask teachers if they think bringing back the paddle might improve life and learning in school.
Take away the paddle and the water board, and how on earth are you going to learn anything from a suicidal terrorist? Shall we send him to the school counselor for a lecture on “good citizenship”?
No, we’ll just turn him loose. Somebody will probably risk violating the law by wagging a finger at him (that’s absolutely illegal in Michigan schools). And we’ll say, “Now, play nice.”