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Elmer Smith: World's best prisons, but can't hold terrorists?
LAST TIME I checked, we had more people locked up in U.S. prisons than have ever been locked up anywhere else in the history of the earth.
We had 2,310,984 people behind bars in city, state and federal prisons in June 2008, according to U.S. Justice Department figures. The U.S. has about 5 percent of the world's population, but more than 25 percent of its prison population.
China, a repressive Communist nation with more than a billion citizens, is a distant second. Despite their best efforts, the Russians couldn't fill Siberian gulags at the rate we lock people up.
Who else could afford the $55 billion a year in state and federal funds that we spend on room and board for criminals? It would be cheaper to send them to Harvard.
But now, some of my representatives in Congress want me to believe that it would be a clear and present danger to national security to lock up some of the 240 Guantanamo Bay detainees in U.S. prisons.
OMG !!!
FBI Director Robert Mueller added his shaky tenor to the frightening chorus. He opposed domestic jails for terror suspects because they may get out someday.
Detainees could "support" terrorism if they ever got out, Mueller warned ominously.
He failed to mention the 500 detainees that the Bush administration released.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Armed Services Committee Chair Ike Skelton, both Democrats, seem to be holding out for a better class of criminals.
"We don't want them around," Reid said.
"They're very unsavory," Skelton said. "I don't know where you put them."
Really? Our prisons already house mass murderers, serial rapists, child molesters, the criminally insane, the insanely criminal. And terrorists.
Where were these fearmongers when we locked up the 347 convicted terrorists who are in U.S. custody now, including the Fort Dix Five? If they are a security threat, shouldn't someone have told us sooner?
What is really going on here? In part, this is about thwarting President Obama's plan to close the U.S. detainee camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Senate voted 90-6 this week to strip $80 million for closing the base from a $91 billion war-spending bill.
"It would be irresponsible and dangerous for the Senate to appropriate money to close it" before seeing the president's plan for transferring the prisoners, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said this week in Senate hearings on the war-spending bill.
He's half right. It would be irresponsible.
Even with a Democratic majority in both houses, the president should not and does not expect Congress to rubber-stamp the base closure.
But it's just as irresponsible to build a constituency against the closure by fanning the flames of fear.
If there is to be a congressional debate on the base closure, let it be an honest debate. Those who favor keeping the base open should say so. They should say why and what their alternative would be.
"The wrong answer," Obama said yesterday, "is to pretend this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo . . . Our security interests won't allow it, our courts won't allow it and neither should our conscience."
The fearmongers all know that no one has ever escaped a supermax U.S. prison. What really underlies this red herring is a distrust of the justice system.
"If terrorists suddenly get the same rights as citizens," said U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, "then we've turned the world upside down."
But how do you determine if they actually are terrorists without putting them on trial? It's one of the questions we would ponder in an honest debate.
If we convict them here, why not punish them here? If a court sentences any of them to death, should we expect another country to carry out that sentence?
And we should answer this one: Why would any other country accept a prisoner that the greatest jailer in the history of the earth is afraid to lock up? *
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith
