Dishonest Discourse

When a presentation is entitled "Transferring GITMO Detainees to Michigan: State Assisted Suicide" you get an idea right away where the conversation is going to head. Spoiler Alert: it's heads to Crazytown as quick as a high-speed train, and crashes just as spectacularly.

It irritates me when there are people who think so little of their audience that they disrespect the importance of the debate about Guantanamo Bay prisoners. This debate includes our own constitutional rights, our international responsibility and so on; you all know the drill.

Some time ago, Governor Granholm proposed a controversial way to bring some money into Michigan and save a little town called Standish from having the prison that supplies the bulk of jobs in that community close down (I hate that prison closure is a job issue, in that we find ways to keep prisons open just to sustain jobs, but that's a post for another day): move the Gitmo prisoners here! Fool-proof, right? It's cold as fuck here, everybody in Michigan owns guns, etc.

Obviously, this brings serious debate, including having to declare an actual, definable status for these prisoners once they enter U.S. soil and the declaration's implications on extradition treaties, the means by which many were incarcerated and so on.

But last Tuesday, did we have that important and heady debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee here in the mitten state?

No.

We get a retired Army Lt. Colonel (Lt. Colonel Cucullu, which at first glance reminded me of Cthulhu) and a former Defense Department analyst named Peter Leitner, who was the Treasurer of the National Republican Trust PAC, which was responsible for that well-balanced ad in 2008 that included a shot of Obama's face superimposed over Muhammed Atta's driver's license. Already, you see the quality of debate we're about to engage in when you've got a guy willing to fund an ad that relies on fear and dishonesty. Turns out, by the way, this Trust PAC is chock-full of birthers and has helped fund that movement.

You can find the presentation here. It is full of real gems, but the best shit comes on page 14 of 15.

In a slide entitled "What's likely here" we learn that if we house Gitmo detainees here in Michigan, we will get:

• Terrorists striking simultaneously at multiple schools, or:
• a Beslan-type attack with fewer terrorists but better bombs
• Middle schools without a police presence are preferred, [because] the girls are big enough to rape; the students are not big enough to fight back; staffed largely by females
• schools with external surveillance cameras are preferred so terrorists can observe LE [law enforcement] response

I don't quite know what the last point has to do with the consequences behind our actions, but it is a great example of the gloriously disjointed presentation.

Look, when that is your bottom line, and when you show pictures of a terrorist bombing at a school that has nothing to do with Al Queda as proof of what Al Queda will do here, then you don't actually have a point in the argument. You're just making noise.

When you call Beslan a "dress rehearsal" for what will come in America, despite no factual link between angry Chechens and detainees in Guantanamo Bay, you are not interested in engaging in debate. You just want to freak people out because you don't really get the issue either. I'd love to do a point-by-point debunking of this power point presentation, but there's no point. It's just sensationalism and an attempt at the delay of a wildly necessary conversation. Why not here? Why not define detainees' status? What can we really expect?

Instead, we get more fear-mongering and avoidance.

**UPDATE**

I added a link to the actual presentation above. Go take a look.