RIP: USA?

From the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave to the Land of Lifelong Detention and the Home of Formless Fear and Hatred. Today's WashPost has an alarming article on the potential fate of our prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Forget everything you thought you could trust to always be true about America and read this:

Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts...

As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.

The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates.

...

The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001, to find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate captives without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access to legal proceedings.

I repeat: detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence.

You can see their point, of course. If they let them go, the world will quickly hear all about how the US treated them in captivity. What to do, what to do?

Keep in mind that there were teens as young as fifteen who were captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere. So we're talking about detention camps in operation for up to eighty-ninety years. And of course there's all the new detainees we will no doubt be picking up in Iraq, Iran and Syria.

This is a sign of an administration that believes it will never be out of power. In fact, I make a fearless prediction; the moment it begins to look like they may lose control of the government, a shocking series of 'accidents' at Gitmo will lead to enormous loss of life - a chemical accident a la Bhopal, for example. I suspect the recent Asian disaster is starting to give people ideas for cheaper 'solutions' to the long-term detention problem.

Fifty-one percent of the US population will be complicit in this. They will have succeeded where the terrorists failed, in destroying the United States of America. The rotting husk that remains won't be worthy of the name.