Don't Close Gitmo

Obama has signed a widely celebrated order to close the Guantánamo Bay detention facility within one year. Gitmo has tarnished the reputation of the United States worldwide, setting the global community back decades and undoing the basic principles of justice we worked so hard for in the aftermath of World War II. In a country that already has problems with faulty convinctions of its own citizens later being cleared with advances in DNA testing, one might think that simply taking the word of the military and the CIA about the putative guilt of any detainee would be beneath even the most credulous supporter of the war on terror. The deterioration of due process is a battle that the terrorists have won due to an own goal on our part.

But I say this: keep it open. Throw in miscreants like Henry Paulson, who helped engineer the largest ripoff in United States history with the EESA/TARP bailout legislation, carefully including language in his original proposal that put him many levels above you and I: "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

Wow. I had no idea Paulson was so much better than you and I. Good thing he told us, or we would never have known.

Let's include John Thain, who quite deliberately doled out billions of dollars in premature bonuses to his cronies within Merrill Lynch a month before Bank of America officially acquired the company, necessitating another $20 billion in taxpayer money to repair the damage he created.

As punishment, Thain was encouraged to retire early on his millions.

Lastly, fill up the remaining seats on the paddy wagon with the many other bankers who treated our taxpayer dollars like so much executive toilet paper. These buffoons have only fed their endless greed while untold numbers of Americans suffered the financial distress of wrecked retirements, lost jobs, and underwater mortgages.

Treason sounds like a good charge to level at these grade-AAA bastards. Treason should be like homicide: even reckless behavior will result in a charge, maybe not of capital murder, but at least of manslaughter. The intent isn't important here; what matters is that through their reckless actions, these money-hungry Wall Street players have injured their nation, meeting at least the definition of treason in Oran's Dictionary of the Law.

But the United States doesn't use Oran's definition, nor does it acknowledge constructive treason. So we need a crack team of imaginative prosecutors. Or maybe we can just declare these top-level financial con men enemy combatants and forget due process; we've done pretty well with that approach so far.

We could begin recovering our wasted dollars by charging admission at Gitmo, with spitting and dunking priveleges granted for a premium.

Hey, stop shoving - I want my turn at operating the waterboard!