Why Are We Getting All NIMBY on Gitmo? (The Nation)

... After Obama signed an executive order to close the prison within a year, Republicans started shouting that the remaining 245 detainees are far too dangerous to house in U.S. prisons. House Minority Leader John Boehner and Congressmen Bill Young have been trying to sic it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her liberal bastion of San Francisco with the oh-so-clever suggestion that Gitmo detainees be housed on Alcatraz ...

... we've had terrorists in U.S. prisons for years. At Colorado's secretive "Supermax" prison, where, along with gangbangers and mobsters, more than 40 terrorists are housed, we have a whole nest of bait for anyone intent on freeing them. The residents include World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, shoe bomber Richard Reid, the so-called 25th 9/11 hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, the "Blind Sheik" Omar Abdel-Rahman, Osama bin Laden's former private secretary Wadih El Hage, and the Qaeda terrorists who bombed the U.S. embassies in Africa (not to mention homegrown terror jockeys like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, and Olympic Park/abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph). No one's come around to rescue them, and they don't appear to be digging tunnels with sharpened toothbrushes, either ...

The Gitmo detainees, however, do pose a real threat if they go on trial in U.S. courts: Evidence of government-mandated torture could see the light of day. If Attorney General Geoffrey Holder decides not to investigate or assign a special prosecuter to pursue possible war crimes by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or the torture-justifying lawyer John Yoo, then such trials--harder to keep secret in the U.S. than in Cuba--could do some of that job for him. No wonder Karl Rove was telling University of Miami students last week, "One year from now, Gitmo won't be closed. If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people."

Now we're talkin' fear. Especially if the people you're thinking about jailing aren't detainees out of Gitmo, but higher-ups in the Bush administration ...

http://www.thenation.com/blogs/state_of_change/403481/why_are_we_getting_all_nimby_on_gitmo

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the names of Congress people came out as witnesses to torture...which could very well be at the heart of that fear.

At all

selected this FRAME for the issue, and guess what, we've been talking about it ever since. They have real talent.

They had some woman who lived near Ft. Leavenworth talking as if it were a given that any terrorists housed there would immediately escape, I'm not sure why. She also feared that these escaped terrorists, finding themselves on the run in Kansas and not speaking English, would "commit terrorist acts" in the tiny towns surrounding the prison. She didn't mention where they would get the weapons to do this, nor why Gitmo terrorists would want to blow up Clem's Farming Supplies or the local Rexall drug store, or whatever she thought would happen.

As I heard the woman talk, I thought "How crazy! This lady has scared herself to death over nothing!" Then I realized she didn't scare herself. She has Fox "News" and right-wing hate radio to do that for her!

America's veins are being poisoned - drip, drip, drip - by these awful right-wing nuts that have been plaguing our country since....since....jeez, when did this all start anyway? It seems to me that St. Ronny's rotten reign was the turning point, am I right? The R's have been insufferable since then.