Moving Guantanamo Detainees: David Loftus

The phrase “dangerous terror suspects” contains an un-American error in logic: it presumes guilt before proof. A suspect is, by definition, only subject to further investigation; he or she cannot, by definition, be dangerous -- not yet, anyway. So the phrase “dangerous terror suspects” is the sort of phrase I would expect to hear from the mouths of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, or John Ashcroft, but not from any American who truly understands and embraces the Constitutional concept of due process under the law.

This is precisely the sort of insecure, defensive, and presumptuous reasoning that got the United States into so much trouble under the Bush administrations and brought down calumny upon our country from much of the rest of the international community. It exhibits the sort of inferiority complex that pretends to possess great strength but is prey to not-very-secret fears. Either we truly believe in the U.S. Constitution and abide by the Geneva Conventions, or we commit torture at legally ambiguous locales such as Guantanamo and aboard secret CIA jet flights to thuggish allies who allow us to do things we would never allow to be done to Americans on U.S. soil, and would protest loudly if our enemies were found to be doing it to our citizens. Either the Department of Homeland Security has been doing its job and preventing acts of terrorism successfully since 2001, as Bush and Ashcroft repeatedly claimed (and therefore we have little or nothing to fear from future threats of domestic terrorism) or it has not, and Bush and Co. didn’t know what they were talking about (and thus the folks imprisoned at Guantanamo and their affiliates really do pose a threat to us). We can’t have it both ways.

I say house the suspects on U.S. soil. Try them under American principles of due process. Otherwise, we can’t honestly claim to stand for liberty and freedom before the international community, and we aren’t really defending our “American way of life” in Iraq and Afghanistan, We certainly couldn’t realistically expect to have other nations -- especially somewhat friendly but nervous Islamic nations, from Pakistan to Egypt -- look up to and support us.