Said the Majority Leader Harry Reid:
A maximum security prison in the United States, there has never been a single escape."
That's not correct. Regular old maximum security prisons haven't contained these guys, these schmos, these Iowans, and this guy, who escaped from the same prison three times.
Anyway, Red Herring!
Supermax facilities -- a class above maximum security prisons -- have been escape-free.
The issue isn't whether terrorists or detainees will escape from Supermax prisons. They won't.
Here's a real issue: the supermax facilities aren't generally accepting new clients these days. They're full. And none are expanding.
And -- there's a real question about dignity (assuming you believe that terrorists ought to be treated like humans) in supermax facilities that is just now gaining the attention of policy-makers. The answer may be that isolation may be the only way to prevent Al Qaeda from forming cells inside the prison, and there may be no other place to put them.
This is one of those occasions when both Democratic and Republican partisans oversimplify and don't do justice to the complexity of the question at hand.
It is an issue that those prisons are full, and the conditions of incarceration in America are at issue in any number of ways. That's all irrelevant to the question of whether it's possible to guarantee security in transferring and detaining people currently at GTMO. It's obvious that we could recreate GTMO with as much or more security in the continental US, and that a detainee escape on Cuba would be as dangerous as one in Colorado. Posit that we build GTMO 2.0 on an uninhabited island within a state and there is absolutely no difference beyond keeping detainees in some extralegal limbo.
Certainly, if you had to come up with a single "real question about Gitmo prisoners" it would have more to do with their legal status than whether or not they got to hang out in the yard with other prisoners.
We can keep people off air bases filled with bombers laden with nuclear weapons but we can't find a military installation in the U.S. that can contain a few guys in jumpsuits and shower sandals? Really?
Well, we can, but if we can only do so by treating them worse than at Gitmo, then what's the point of closing it anyway?
The New Yorker article linked makes a strong case that Supermax treatment is itself torture. Is it worse than waterboarding, even? Well, there does seem to be documented cases of permanent psychosis in some prisoners, more so than with waterboarding. Waterboarding is more terrifying in the short term, but Supermax is pretty terrible in the long term.
The point of closing it isn't to give the detainees cozy conditions; it's to take our fingers out of our ears and recognize that, to the extent still possible after nearly a decade of ignoring the law, it's time to proceed under some actual legal framework. Bush did a superb job running out the clock, losing every significant court battle along the way.
Provided that prosecutions start for detainees that we have evidence against, and we actually have evidence that the people we're holding without trial were picked up on the battlefield (whatever that even means), and that everyone not in these two categories is released, comparisons between the creature comforts of Supermax prisons and GTMO are irrelevant. I don't know what further psychological damage is possible after 8 years of solitary confinement, although I'm sure Cheney has some ideas.
But if that's the point, why is Obama also pushing those same court battles and delaying the trials further to make minor tweaks to the legal framework. He's also proposed holding some detainees indefinitely, the ones we don't have evidence against.
So far then, Obama is also doing a "superb job running out the clock." Fewer prosecutions have started than would have otherwise. Of course, things certainly could change, and I hope that they do, but right now Obama is running the clock out on the prisoners just as much as Bush, and proposing only to shift them from one form of torture to another equally bad.
The ordinary conditions at a Supermax is far worse than Gitmo, obviously leaving out things like waterboarding. The type of solitary at a Supermax is far worse. But you obviously don't actually care about not torturing the prisoners, just about hating Cheney.
I believe supermax prisons are the ones being considered, especially as 30+ (famously including KSM) are imprisoned in the supermax prison in Florence, CO. To my knowledge, no one has ever successfully attempted an escape - let alone a break-in - of a supermax facility.
John's correct. I well remember when Pelican Bay was opened in CA. There was quite an outcry from human rights groups, saying the conditions there - almost complete isolation, 1 hr. of exercise a day - were tantamount to torture.