More Bush baloney from Blumner

Perhaps realizing that she'll have to get it out of her system, St. Petersburg Times editorial columnist Robyn "Blumñata" Blumner fired another errant rhetorical blast at soon-to-be-ex-president George Bush.

Blumner's awful offal offering coalesces around Guantanamo.

Guantanamo is one royal fiasco. It remains open even though Bush said more than two years ago that he'd like to see it close. The holdup is due to all the thorny legal issues surrounding the remaining 255 or so prisoners. Issues such as, how do you prosecute a prisoner when the ostensible evidence against him was elicited through torture or torture "lite"? Issues that are a direct consequence of Bush and his vice president's approval of prisoner abuse, ghost detainees, rendition and indefinite detention without charge.

No doubt Blumner and other horizontal left-leaners would like for Guantanamo to eventually result as a royal fiasco. But if the United States was to keep captured terrorists without letting other nations keep them for us (resulting in rendition complaints), then something along the lines of Guantanamo was needed. Bringing prisoners to the United States proper would have increased pressure for such prisoners to be treated with full Constitutional rights, something such prisoners only deserve if the Constitution doubles as a suicide pact.

Blumner, like a stopped clock hitting the right time once or twice per day, gets it right when she says that legal issues keep Guantanamo open--many of the same ones that made Guantanamo or something like it necessary in the first place.

As for Blumner's recommended example, "how do you prosecute a prisoner when the ostensible evidence against him was elicited through torture or torture 'lite'?, it's easy. You simply remember that Constitutional rights apply primarily to U.S. citizens and not to foreigners engaged in terrorism. You don't need to read a member of al Qaeda a Miranda warning when you capture him in Afghanistan. He is not entitled to a phone call. And unless he's wearing a uniform along with a number of other qualifying aspects, he need not be treated as a POW according to the Geneva Conventions.

The end of the Blumner paragraph quoted above makes pretty clear that she considers the failure to treat Guantanamo detainees far better than the law requires a problem, even if it were agreed that waterboarding should be a forbidden torture method. After all, only three confirmed cases of waterboarding have occurred, and there are more than three prisoners at Guantanamo.

But lest we distract from the Bush-bashing:

But Bush has never acknowledged that opening Guantanamo as a legal black hole to dump terror suspects potentially for the remainder of their lives was a mistake. The closest he's come is to express exasperation. Back in June 2006, Bush told reporters in Vienna after a summit with European Union leaders, "I'd like to end Guantanamo. I'd like it to be over with."

Is there some reason why Bush should admit that it was a mistake? Don't readers of the Times want to know nearly to the extent that National Enquirer readers do? Don't keep us in suspense, Blumñata!

It was a feint, an appeaser's answer. Bush never intended to act. As reported last week by the New York Times, Bush "never considered" options that were drawn up by the Pentagon and State Department for closing the prison camp. Our feckless president's modus operandi for his last months in office is to hand off the baton, so that none of the disastrous fallout from his policies appears to accrue to his presidency.

But keep us in suspense she does, while accusing Bush of insincerity with insufficient grounds. Blumner claims that Bush "never intended to act" but no good evidence supports that accusation. Yes, The New York Times paraphrased anonymous administration officials to the effect that the president never considered specific plans for closing Guantanamo. And the Gray Lady also provided the flaw in the argument Blumner uses to suggest that Bush didn't mean it:

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

How could Blumner leave that part out unless she was deliberately trying to deceive her readers? Sure beats me. Maybe she only read or remembered the portion of the story that pleased her. Or perhaps I should just skip evidence and draw my conclusions the same way Blumner draws hers: Blumner is a bald-faced liar.

We know that the remaining Guantanamo prisoners will have to be released or tried under a fair process. Some have now been held for longer than World War II raged. But Bush will leave that difficult job to someone else.

The Bush administration used what has been considered a fair process in the past. The federal court system ignored precedent and found military tribunals unsatisfactory. That decision threw a monkey wrench into the works. Perhaps only if Bush had made the court's decision could Blumner have criticized it and fixed there the blame for the current difficulty surrounding Guantanamo detainees.

Note she's all over Bush for not getting the job done (not for lack of trying, if Blumner were fair about it) while at the same time hinting at sympathy for the next president who will inherit this "difficult job."

See how difficult it gets after the next domestic terror attack.

Then, if a dangerous prisoner ends up being released, fingers will point to the president who insisted on due process.

Due process is a constitutional right. In war, we kill people regularly without due process. It is insane to apply constitutional due process to the conduct of war, and detaining enemy combatants is part of the conduct of war. In short, it would be entirely appropriate to point fingers at the dope of a president who insists on due process for enemy combatants.

And until that happens we can at least still point fingers at a dope of an editorialist who advocates that type of stupidity.

But no matter how many former detainees may turn violently against the United States, the danger cannot compare to that caused by the very existence of Guantanamo and the explosive anger it has stoked in the Muslim world.

The anger in the Muslim world over Guantanamo doesn't seem any greater than that caused by cartoons that feature Islam's prophet, from what I can see. Far less, if anything. Perhaps President Bush should turn his attention to that thorny legal problem, for if the anger over Guantanamo is explosive then the potential anger caused by printing Muhammad cartoons is surely thermonuclear.

Perhaps it should occur to Blumner that Islamic anger may be channeled for the purpose of advancing radical Islam. But I doubt it will. Blumner has the advance of her own ideology on which to focus; facts such as the world wide cartoon riots are part of a blurry background if they aren't Photoshopped out of the picture entirely.