Why Are We Getting All NIMBY on Gitmo?

By Leslie Savan

The most satisfying spectacle of Barack Obama’s first days as president has been the way he and his crew have gone about striking the theatrical sets of the terror government to reveal the real America that’s been backstage to Bush & Co. all along. But even as the backdrops come down and the kliegs are killed, the mainstream media still wander the stage, reciting the same old lines.

The clearest example of this Potemkin play-acting is the Beltway press "debate" about the closing of the extralegal prison on Guantanamo Bay. 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.

The idea, of course, is to portray her as a NIMBY hypocrite (if not also someone who’d rather protect her gay pals than your family), a point CNN’s John King left wafting in the wind on his Sunday show, even though it makes about as much sense as saying Gitmo inmates should be imprisoned in downtown Cleveland’s Art Park, which would be the equivalent in Boehner’s home state. By accident, King had already aired Pelosi’s response on ABC’s This Week, when she politely corrected the congressmen: "Alcatraz," she said, "is a tourist attraction. It’s a prison that’s now sort of like a national park." But King was busy paying no attention to the soundbite behind the curtain. "That was the wrong piece of sound there," he said when the rogue snippet ran. Later, as he turned to the topic of Guantanamo Bay, King burrowed in: "Not in my backyard. Nancy Pelosi already this morning saying not in Alcatraz. Are the detainees going to end up in red states?"

     Talk about declining property values! Everyone knows that everyone else will grab their pitchforks to keep the worst of the worst jailbirds off their lawns. As John McCain told Fox News Sunday, "I don’t know of a state in America that wants them in their state. It’s going to–you think Yucca Mountain is a NIMBY problem? Wait till you see this one." Then he chuckled, apparently forgetting that during the campaign he pushed the military’s maximum security prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, as the place to lock ’em up once Gitmo becomes the new Alcatraz.

But why, in the first place, do politicians insist that these tortured and uncharged prisoners are less welcome on U.S. soil than nuclear waste? And why do the media so eagerly accept that premise? These same pols and pundits seem unconcerned that the millions of criminals we’ve already locked up will escape from the rapidly growing archipelago of prisons scattered from coast to coast. (The U.S. has by far the largest percentage of its population behind bars of any country in the world.) Communities in red states and blue are clamoring to host new prisons, because they’re often the only employers around in the new Goldman-Sacked America. It’s virtually a Republican-mandated industry, prisons.

Nonetheless, the media propagating this NIMBY frame still look to the Republicans as the folks who say the right thing and swing the most powerful nightstick, all evidence to the contrary. And when the media has at hand an easy-to-understand phrase like "Not in my backyard"–evoking a mob of angry citizens flocking to a populist rightwing issue–they can’t help but let it shape, and limit, the entire discussion.

Disposing of Gitmo prisoners is without doubt extremely complex, but the Republicans’ top two arguments for keeping them eternally in Cuba are an unholy mix of fantasy and propaganda that folds under its own weight:

First, they say, bringing Gitmo prisoners onto American soil will invite the bad guys to troll your neighborhood like sex offenders. Either because the government will free them on technicalities (like not reading them their Miranda rights, as GOP congressman Steve King absurdly proposed), or because their Qaeda brothers will target the prisons holding them, Middle Eastern jihadists will suddenly descend on America, threatening our way of life and parking in the handicapped spots in front of Rite-Aid.

But 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.

This GOP projection onto terrorists is based on a Hollywood supermax fantasy-Rambo II goes back to ‘Nam and frees the MIA/POWs. Or, maybe, it’s Fox TV’s Prison Break or 24, where terrorists often seem to have nine lives.

Second, Republicans hint, if the inmates do go to trial in the U.S. and are found innocent, we mustn’t release them, because they hate us too much. Even the sheepherders and cabdrivers mistakenly picked up in Afghanistan, they’ll turn terrorist on us, too. Didn’t 61 Gitmoers released by gimlet-eyed Bush ops do just that? CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr, also on John King’s show, said, "They [the Pentagon] know that about 60 of the people that were incarcerated at Guantanamo and then released have returned to the battlefield, have engaged in further terrorist activities."

That was shot down as bogus 10 days earlier, in a detailed Seton Hall Law School study by law professor Mark Denbeaux, who represents two detainees (and who you can see here and here on The Rachael Maddow Show.)

Every time they have been required to identify the parties, the DOD has been forced to retract their false IDs and their numbers. They have included people who have never even set foot in Guant namo, much less were they released from there. They have counted people as ‘returning to the fight’ for their having written an Op-ed piece in the New York Times and for their having appeared in a documentary exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival…. Forty-three times they have given numbers–which conflict with each other–all of which are seriously undercut by the DOD statement that ‘they do not track’ former detainees.

But even if you compound all those numbers, they are dwarfed by the thousands and thousands of terrorists we’ve created since the moment we invaded Iraq. And, according to former special ops interrogator Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist, the number-one reason foreign fighters give for attacking Americans in Iraq is the abuse and torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

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.

Some journalists have tried to break out of the fear paradigm, but old habits die hard. I’m no trekkie, but all this savage demonization of "enemies" real and imagined does remind me of that classic Star Trek episode, "Day of the Dove," in which an alien entity stokes racism and manufactures atrocities to make Kirk’s crew and the Klingons fight each other so it can feed off the energy of their mutual hatred. With the help of the emotionless nonmammalian Mr. Spock, Kirk convinces Kang, the Klingon commander, that the only way to beat the alien is to let positive feelings smother the bad and simply laugh the monster out into the cold of space. (Here is the whole episode; the denunciation starts toward the end. Or you could check out this shorter clip, in which a real trekkie saw the analogy to Ann Coulter’s shtick a couple years ago.)

Our own nonmammalian, President Obama, is trying in some fashion to do just that with bipartisan cocktail hours and a charm offensive on the Hill. But let’s face it, the Kang and Kodos of laughing at the Republican Party have been Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Here Stewart rings out Bush on Gitmo, with "Guantanamo Bay Watch, the Final Season."

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