The Gitmo question

It's Saturday morning, and, as usual, I'm feeding the C-SPAN addiction. The current topic is Guantanamo, i.e., what to do with the detainees?

Isn't the answer obvious? Get a system in place for fair trials, and, if the evidence isn't tainted, put the guilty ones in federal prisons. U.S. prisons are packed full of extremely dangerous convicts now -- serial killers, domestic terrorists like Eric Rudolph, etc. -- and we don't work ourselves into a lather over whether or not their friends and/or fans are going to engage in various nefarious plots either to avenge their imprisonment or break them out.

And if there isn't sufficient evidence for a guilty verdict? Turn them loose. Period. Ship them back to wherever they're from, and move on.

On the news over the past day or so, ever since President Obama issued the executive order that will close Gitmo, the talking heads have been going on and on about some dude who was in Gitmo, was released to the Saudis, and then turned up later as a major player in the Al Qaeda movement.

The question I have, of course, is was this man a terrorist when we stuck him in Gitmo in the first place, or did we turn him into one? If I got snatched off the street in Afghanistan or Pakistan or some other country by some warlord, sold to the Americans as a "suspected terrorist," and then went through several years of "enhanced interrogation" before being released, if I wasn't a terrorist when I went into Gitmo I sure as hell would be one when I got out.

Which is, I guess, a way of saying it's irrelevant how we dispose of the detainees because whatever we do, we're screwed. The U.S. has sown dragon's teeth, and we're going to be dealing with the consequences of our own stupidity for quite a few years to come.