On Closing Gitmo
“Here’s a clip of Rep. Pete Hoekstra at the presser this morning explaining to a particularly thick reporter why the threat posed by al Qaeda detainees is different, and far more serious, that that posed by German prisoners of war. As Hoekstra explains, the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work.“
I’ve never found myself arguing that Nazis were actually pretty harmless, let alone trying to prove my point by asserting that unlike the Nazis, really bad guys kill at least 3,000 innocent civilians. If I ever do, I’ll consider it a red flag signalling that perhaps my argument is absurd.
Would I want an Al Qaeda detainee at the municipal jail a mile from my house? No. It’s a minimum security holding facility in a densely populated urban area. But I’m pretty sure we’ve got maximum security prisoners, not to mention remote military bases, that are pretty easy to defend against jailbreak attempts, and if we don’t have any, perhaps this is a good opportunity to hollow out a mountain, or even build a facility in Alaska so “tough” Sarah Palin’s presence can assuage the fears of the very partisan hacks most likely to stoke public fears about closing Gitmo. This isn’t to say that there aren’t any reasonable arguments against the closure—just that I haven’t seen any being made.
I leave you with Hilzoy.
In some ways, Al Qaeda is the closest thing we have in this world to an actual set of super villains. I wonder if that causes people to forget that they don’t have super powers and are not comic book characters and thus are highly unlikely to escape from secure prisons. Or maybe Jailbreak just had a greater impact on the American psyche than I realized.
— Greg Sanders · May 7, 10:05 PM · #
Interesting . . . Hoekstra said: “. . . the Germans didn’t kill three thousand American civilians as they went to work.”
Well, actually the Germans killed a bunch of other civilians in their homes. Quite a few in the surprise bombings of Warsaw or Amsterdam or London for starters. And, then I think I heard something about a bunch of folks in Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau etc . . . Probably shouldn’t leave out Lidice either.
And, then the murder of American POWs during the Battle of the Bulge.
Maybe, Hoekstra might actually read up on his history before making such outlandish, stupid, and erroneous statements. How can our elected representatives be so truly ignorant of the past?
— Continuum · May 7, 10:38 PM · #
Continuum, what part of the statement “the Nazis didn’t kill 3000 American civilians” do you not understand?
— y81 · May 7, 10:46 PM · #
My understanding is that constituents in districts with such prisons and bases are pretty upset at the prospect of holding terrorists in their backyard. It may not be a security problem, but it certainly is a political problem.
— Blar · May 7, 11:48 PM · #
what part of the statement “the Nazis didn’t kill 3000 American civilians” do you not understand?
Well, the part in which it’s relevant given the fact that the Nazis killed ten of millions of civilians from other countries. And depending on how you count merchant sailors, it may not even be true.
— Duvall · May 8, 08:20 PM · #
Killing thousands of civilians doesn’t make the terrorists any more dangerous than the US military.
— SqueakyRat · May 8, 08:21 PM · #
It’s astonishing to me that someone named Goldfarb knows so little about what the Nazis accomplished in World War II, or what a close-run thing the war truly was. Look up the “Second Happy Time” or “Operation Drumbeat” in any decent history of World War II. (see http://wapedia.mobi/en/Second_happy_time or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic_(1939%E2%80%931945)#Operation_Drumbeat_.28January_1942_.E2.80.93_June_1942.29)
Nazi U-Boats sank American shipping within sight of the beaches Americans swam on, between January and August of 1942. And unless Goldfarb thinks that Merchant Marine didn’t really work for a living, I would count their deaths as having occurred “as they went to work”.
Honestly, how do these people manage to shave themselves without looking in the mirror?
— Jon Gallagher · May 10, 12:27 AM · #