May 8, 2009

From C-SPAN May 7, 2009. The GOP is pulling out its latest fear card with the "Keep the Terrorists Out of America Act". When asked by a reporter about the 425,000 Axis POW's America detained after WWII, Pete Hoekstra replies with this:

Hoekstra: It's night and day.... Because in WWII I don't think we expected the, you know, you didn't have the threat from home grown terrorism. You didn't have...remember these folks successfully attacked us on 9-11, 3000 Americans died. And the threat and the specter of the threat that we face today from radical Jihadists is very, very different than the threat that we faced from Germany or Japan in WWII. Putting these people in the middle of our communities puts those communities at risk and puts the people that work at those facilities at risk because they can be very, very easily identified. It is a total different threat assessment when you are in Gitmo vs when you are in a community in our homeland.

d-day has a lot more on this latest fiasco over at Hullabaloo.

Then they followed through with the main event, a bill literally called “The Keep Terrorists Out Of America Act,” which would prohibit the transfer of any "Terrorist" from Guantanamo Bay into a prison facility in the United States, without approval from the state's Governor and legislature, and some other legislative hoop-jumping.

Taken to its extreme, Republicans would call for the immediate closure of all prisons ("criminals... in your community!"), and the dispatching of all 2.3 million prisoners to some offsite floating barge, Australia, or that island of plastic in the Pacific. To suggest that a maximum-security prison could not possibly hold a Dangerous Terrorist is an insult to the men and woman of the federal corrections system, who already hold convicted terrorists in custody who received justice through a court of law, and basically acknowledges that those facilities are completely insecure, and should be feared by local residents.

I'm sure the RNC and the Republican members of the House will pick up the costs of moving every single prisoner over to that plastic island. Because think of the children.

The Plum Line has a summary of the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act". Be afraid, America. Be very afraid. It's all they have left.

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