Many of those who oppose President Obama’s decision to shut down our detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and relocate its inmates to prisons inside the U.S. are using the wrong argument. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense. They claim that U.S. citizens would be endangered by such a move, due to the fact that these prisoners might escape and commit acts of terrorism.
So their argument rests on the idea that federal maximum security prisons wouldn’t be secure enough to hold these guys? When’s the last time someone escaped from one of these prisons? I can’t think of when it was. Keep in mind that state and federal prisons in the U.S. house the likes of serial killers, mob bosses, gang leaders, armed robbers, rapists, and child molesters.
Even if some of the accused terrorists were to escape, are we supposed to believe that they would be more dangerous than those hardened criminals? Funny, I don’t hear any of the “save our Gitmo” crowd warning of the danger that people like Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, Terry Nichols, Ted Kaczynski, and Dennis Rader might pose at their present penal venues and demanding that they be sent to offshore prisons. How come? Because they are making a fallacious argument and they know it.
It is nothing more than a red herring, a distraction until they can think of a legitimate case to make for their point of view. They just know that shutting down Gitmo is bad, so they have to say something. For now, they are stuck with having to say, “Well, …, um, …, a, …, the terrorist suspects might escape!” Yeah, that’s the ticket!
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