The Keep Arbitrary Detainees in a Geographic and Legal No-Man’s-Land Chosen Deliberately to Enhance Dick Cheney’s Hard-On for Executive Power Act

Republicans might as well be specific here. I suppose it’s possible that some people are willing to accept the argument that Guantanamo was chosen as a detention site because “illegal combatants” posed a grave threat threat to Americans that could only be adequately contained on an isolated naval base. (Certain law professors, for example, wondered if Jose Padilla might actually “communicate in code by blinking.”) And some people are probably dumb enough to overlook the fact that Republicans are eliding the difference between “releasing” and “transferring” detainees to the US.

But all that really needs to be pointed out is that Guantanamo Bay was selected because people who mattered in the Bush administration did not want to place captives anywhere that would subject their policies to another country’s laws (or another country’s willingness to care if human rights obligations were minded). Alternately, the Bush administration did not want to negotiate a SOFA with, say, Guam or American Samoa, because these were US territories were US laws would apply. Indeed, if keeping “terrorists” out of the US had been the sole priority, a site like Wake Island would arguably have served just as well — it’s unpopulated, geographically remote, and under the control of the US Air Force. But detainees on Wake Island would likely have received the very legal protections that would have made Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales cry, and so the Bush administration elected to use Guantanamo. As it turned out, the Supreme Court was unwilling to allow the administration to do as it pleased; with Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene, the policy of arbitrary detention was undermined to the point that Guantanamo could no longer serve the lawless purposes for which it was created.

Republicans who boast of their concerns about “fascism” are apparently worried that Guantanamo won’t be available any longer for arbitrary detention and torture; by contrast, they’re in a simulated panic that the Obama administration is preparing to release an army of jihadi Willie Hortons into the streets. Pathetic.