Our Sacred Ground

I'm angry. I'm really angry. I'm angry about the quasi-religious, mildly superstitious, illogical, irrational, foolish, ill-considered, and downright stupid rhetoric that has swept the nation ever since Obama announced that he would close Guantanamo by January 2010. My blood pressure is rising a little bit as I write this. I feel on edge.

This rhetoric is coming from Democrats and Republicans. From law-and-order shoot-em-up types and sensible people alike. And because it is coming from all corners, the Obama administration is giving it purchase. The executive branch— the same one claiming the power to hold "terrorists"—is performing acrobatic, gymnastic, ridiculous feats to overcome the strength and power of this rhetoric that has swept the nation, as if it made any sense at all. I give you Harry Reid, Democratic Senator from Nevada and the Senate Majority Leader, one of the most powerful men in the country:

REID: I'm saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That's very clear.

QUESTION: No one's talking about releasing them. We're talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.

REID: Can't put them in prison unless you release them.

QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? ...

REID: I can't make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

A few days later, Reid amended his statement to something bland like "we want more detail about the president's plan," but he did so not because what he said was patently ridiculous, but because of his perceived "gaffe" of saying "can't put them in prison unless you release them." Which sounds stupid. So he had to retract because he sounded stupid. But, although that sentence was bizarrely worded, I think what he's getting at is true:

If you put the people who are currently held at Guantanamo in the American criminal justice system, some of them are going to be released. Because some of them are innocent. And once their cases are thrown into the light that is United States Federal Court, that's going to become painfully clear.

That's what no one, Republicans and Democrats alike, wants. Because they seem to have forgotten everything about the rule of law, and reverted instead to ooga-booga logic. Remember the witch-craze of the seventeenth century where after you'd been accused of being a witch, you basically were one, and anything you did was proof that you were a witch? If you acted witchy, then obviously, you were a witch. If you didn't act witchy, then you were just using your witchy powers to disguise your true nature.

So, now that these men, just under two hundred of them, have been accused of being terrorists, they are terrorists forever. Even when they have been cleared by a court of law. Even when prosecutors drop cases against them for lack of evidence. If they pledge Death to America, they are terrorists. If they don't pledge Death to America, they are lying sacks of shit who are pretending to be docile so they can get released and blow us all up.

Nearly every single elected official is ready to freak out and turn into a Baptist minister as soon as anyone announces, or even suggests, that any one of the one hundred and ninety-six* men held in isolation at Guantanamo will be put within five hundred miles of a single one of their constituents.

Not on American soil. Not in America.

Nevermind that for legal purposes, Guantanamo is America. The District of Columbia Circuit ruled back in 2005 in In re Guantanamo Detainee Cases that since Guantanamo Bay is under exclusive United States control, it basically is part of the United States territory.

The Obama administration can not keep these men at Guantanamo. Obama made an explicit campaign promise that he would shutter it. He has announced since becoming president that he will close it. So he has to put them somewhere else. But as soon as he talks about trying them in American courts, or putting them in American prisons, people like Harry Reid and nearly all the other elected officials start freaking out. They go ooga-booga.

Not in America, they say. Not on American soil.

What is so special about American soil? What is so special about the field in Kansas, the trees in Michigan, the dirt roads of Southern Illinois that these men can not be near them? I do not believe in the sacredness of ground. I do not believe that America is God's special country that God loves more than all the other countries, and that He loves the Chesapeake Bay more than Guantanamo Bay or the Mississippi more than the Nile. Other people believe that, and they are being allowed to run our government, they are being allowed to hijack not just the public discourse but the lives and civil liberties and freedom of one hundred and ninety-six men because they think our dirt is fucking special and suddenly, anyone who does not like America or might be a criminal can not be near it. As if their subversion, their antipathy, their righteous grievances against us will travel like pixie dust through the rocks and pebbles and get in our groundwater.

So instead of releasing the ones who can not be charged and putting the rest in secure prisons, the Obama administration does acrobatics, proposes improbable solutions. Over the weekend, the AP reported that the Obama administration is considering a plan to create a special prison in the United States for these men. A "complex," they call it. With a courthouse on site. Never mind that there are already quite a few prisons in the United States that have a courthouse on site for this very reason (transporting prisoners is costly). But even this isn't good enough.

Congress has blocked $80 million intended to bring the detainees to the United States. Lawmakers want the administration to say how it plans to make the moves without putting Americans at risk.

Not our soil, they say. Not our dirt. This superstitious bullshit makes me so mad I am having trouble staying calm to write this. There are thousands, no, millions of men and women who are incarcerated on our goddamn dirt and have done terrible things, things far worse than any of the men at Guantanamo are alleged to have done.

And we keep them here. Because, with our incredibly expensive and punitive prison-industrial complex, finely honed after 40 years of explosive growth, if there's one thing Americans know, it's how to keep people locked up. Do our great senators and representatives, who are getting the tremors and the smelling salts at the thought of having these men in prisons in America, know anything about the escape rate from American prisons?

This 2001 article describes what was, at that time, a low and quickly declining escape rate. As he says, most of the escapes that do happen (less than one-half of one percent of prisoners) are from minimum-security community corrections facilities. But from federal prisons? "One federal prisoner escaped and was recaptured in 1999, out of a prison population of more than 115,000. He was the only one to escape in the past four years."

One. One guy. Who was recaptured. Because when law enforcement are charged with capturing someone who they know everything about—height, weight, tattoos, build (hell, they've got pictures)—and it's imperative that they find the person, they're pretty good at it. Really good, in fact.

So, if we think about it at all, we know these guys aren't going to escape, especially with the vigilant attention I'm sure they'll be given. What it is then? What is so bad about having them near us? Especially when we need them here so that we can give them the due process they deserve, not as citizens, but as human beings? If you're in America, you have constitutional rights no matter who you are. That's the whole goddamn point of the thing. But no, as much as our senators and representatives love to crow about how awesome the constitution is, as if it, too, like our dirt, is sacred, it's "good for me but not for thee" with these guys. The Constitution is a brilliant document that has made American government the benevolent behemoth that it is today, but we can't let people be incarcerated in America because they might benefit from its protections. Go figure.

Obama's proposed detention complex, as ridiculous as it is, is still not ok with the men we elected to serve us. Even though it's basically a cover for doing exactly what we're doing now, just in a different location with better dirt under it. For instance, the administration's plan, according to the AP, calls for:

Building immigration detention cells for detainees ordered released by courts but still behind bars because countries are unwilling to take them.

That's illegal. I'm not an immigration law expert or even practitioner, but my reading of Clark v. Martinez is that if you can't deport someone because their country won't take them, you can not hold them indefinitely. That's what INS used to do, particularly with a group of Cubans who had come over on the Muriel boat and subsequently committed crimes that were "deportable" offenses. So at the end of their criminal sentences, they were ordered deported. Cuba said nope. The government tried to just keep them in immigration detention indefinitely. And the Supreme Court has ruled, twice now, that they can't do that.

Some of them we will bring to the United States, but we can't try them because they are too dangerous. Huh? The administration's plan:

Providing long-term holding cells for a small but still undetermined number of detainees who will not face trial because intelligence and counterterror officials conclude they are too dangerous to risk being freed.

It's nice, at least, that they're admitting exactly what they're planning to do, which shows just how ridiculous it is. There are apparently people who are so bad, so dangerous and diabolical, that you couldn't possibly try them for the awful things they've committed, because they might win. Even though, let's face it, what the hell juror in the world is going to vote to acquit? Come on. No, the fear is that they'll get off on a "technicality." "Getting off on technicalities" is my least favorite phrase in the universe of criminal justice speak. Those "technicalities" are called "constitutional rights." And you know what? People who are guilty of crimes go free all the time. They go free because the victim doesn't want to press charges. Because there's not enough evidence to try them. Because prosecutors prioritize certain crimes over others. Because they are acquitted even though they actually committed the crime. Because they did their time and now they're getting out. Because they pled out to time served. Because, and because, and because.

Any criminal justice system that purported to arrest and incarcerate every single person who committed a crime in the country would be, by its very nature, an extremely punitive and harsh one. Not that our system isn't harsh; it is. But do we really want it to be harsher than this? Do we really want to give up on the constitution?

I want to know if the senators and representatives who are giving into public fears, fears that they are trumping up and validating with their toxic "not on American soil" rhetoric, know anything about what it's like in a maximum or super-maximum security prison. I think they must, because incarceration is part of the biggest business of government and its issues come before them. Well, I do. I have visited more than ten prisons and jails in the State of Illinois. I have corresponded with and interviewed hundreds of prisoners and detainees in these facilities. I have pored over hand-drawn diagrams of cells, painstakingly measured and with annotations, sent to me in the mail. I have listened to the horror that is isolation and the desolation that is life in supermax. Where you decline your "recreation" time because "recreation" is standing among four concrete walls so high that you can only see sky. Where you are punished so severely that the only further punishment they can give you, if you break a rule, is to serve you a "meal loaf" so disgusting you can't stomach it. Because you have nothing else to call your own, nothing they can take away from you.

For our elected representatives, the men and women we elect because they are supposed to the best and brightest and most noble, to say that this horror is too good for men who have not yet been convicted of anything is painful for me to bear.

Dear elected representatives: Enough. Bring them here. Try them. They are human beings, and our ground is not sacred. Our dirt will survive with the walls that bind them built upon it. Stop this racist, superstitious, illogical, fear-mongering, ridiculous charade. You are not charged with protecting us. The people who are—the police officers and judges and correctional officers and prison administrators and military personnel—are ready to take on the task because they know you're full of shit and that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

*I can't seem to validate the 196 number that's in my head, but I know I got it somewhere. This June article has the number at 224, and I know some have been released since then, so at least I'm in the ballpark.

The image at the top of this post is from Tamms Supermax prison in Illinois.