NIMBY

Today I want to shed some "lyte" on self-interest.  At the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama signed an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay.  Now that order is beginning to look a little premature.  No one wants the detainees.

Well, Bermuda is going to take four of them. But they are not the scary, dangerous Islamic terrorists.  They are Chinese Uighurs, who are Muslim, but neither scary nor dangerous.  You must come from a country that a) ends in "stan", or b) supplies us with oil, in order to qualify as scary and dangerous.

We don't even want these guys on our soil.  Apparently our Supermax prisons are not secure enough to hold these wily fellows.  Never mind that there has never been a successful prison break at a Supermax prison.  Never mind that we have federal facilities that are totally surrounded by military bases. Never mind that we already have terrorists serving their time right here on American soil.  Nope, these guys are too hot to handle and can only be secured on a island that is a whopping 90 or so miles from our precious soil.

Speaking of islands, some suggested that we could house these folks at Alcatraz.  What an awesome idea!  There's just that small problem that it is a tourist attraction.  Maybe we could combine the two?   I can see the t-shirts now, "My parents were waterboarded at Alcatraz but all I got was this slightly damp t-shirt".  

So, I want to make sure I understand this; it was okay to snatch these guys from their countries of origin, often on trumped-up charges.  It was okay to subject them to "enhanced interrogation" techniques.  It was okay to suspend habeas corpus.  But it is definitely not okay to imprison them in the country that totally fucked up their and their family's lives and trashed said country's international reputation.  That is just too much of a violation.