Look out – Guantanamo prisoners coming to South Carolina. Flee for your lives!

People seem to be jumping on the fear train in anticipation of President Obama shutting down Guantanamo prison and possibly hosting them in a military prison. You know – because these guys are going to pull a Keifer Sutherland, escape, go running around South Carolina.

Look, I get it. Terrorists are scary. But you know what’s almost as scary? A government that allows torture, imprisonment without a trial, and sets up kangaroo courts to try people.

All of those torture fans might get off scott free

Suppose you think torture is awesome. But there is this pesky thing called the Constitution that says “torture bad”, and if you do it, you can go to jail for a looooong time. And on top of that, if you’re a President who says “Yeah, torture, rock on,” you could be fired from your job.

It’s just so unfair!

The solution is easy, though. All you have to do is get outgoing President Bush to issue you a pardon saying all those time you beat up prisoners or forced them to feel like they were drowning is all forgiven. That way, you can ignore that whole “rule of law” thing and get down to business!

(sigh)

What will Obama do with Guantanamo

It’s still a big question. One of Obama’s platforms was his plan to end the shame that is Guantanamo with the torture and water boarding and lack of habeaus corpus.

But dealing with Guantanamo may be more complicated than that. The Obama transition team is pondering how to handle the detainees – how to try them when evidence may have been tainted by those harsh interrogation techniques, who to let go – and how do you handle the secret evidence in a court of law?

Any legal experts out there want to give us a clue?

Gitmo judge: Confession via torture can not be used

This is one of those things that should be kind of obvious: testimony gathered under torture can not be used, because a person will say anything to make the torture stop. So when a judge overseeing the trial of Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed Jawad’s throws out Mr. Jawad’s confession because it was obtained over torture, I can only see that as perfectly proper.

OK – we can’t charge you with war crimes, so we’re charging you with – war crimes

There are moments when you just want to go “Oh, come on.” You have people in Guantanamo going on 5 years now who were finally getting their day in court. However, when the former prosecutor quit because he found the US was withholding evidence from the defense, the military decided to drop the charges – but won’t let them go because they haven’t charged them with a crime yet.

Wait – they can do that? Just say “You know what, we just learned we’re going to charge you, but when we found out we were losing because our own prosecutor felt there was bullshit going on – so hey, we’ll just drop the charges but keep you in prison anyway.”

Learn to abuse prisoners like a pro

If you read through the book The Shock Doctrine (and if you haven’t what’s wrong with you?), you’ll read about how many really cool torture techniques were learned, then exported around the world.

Most people would see that as a mark of shame, and something that a nation should repent in sackcloth and ashes for. Other asshats would decide no – let’s make a manual of the ways we can abuse prisoners! Screw due process – if we arrested them, they must be guilty of something, right?

Which is why now you, too, can learn the tips from the pros and read the official Guantanamo prisoner operating procedures – or check out the original PDF document of the same.

Now you, too, can learn how to belly slap, use stress positions like “Worship-the-Gods”, and even the proper way to “manhandle”! Wow – who knew prisoner abuse could sound so homoerotic?