Quoting Reuters, quoting the WP (link):
The Bush administration is preparing plans for possible lifetime detention of suspected terrorists, including hundreds whom the government does not have enough evidence to charge in courts …
… the Defense Department … plans to ask the U.S. Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military tribunal for lack of evidence
“… we are at a point in time where we have to say, ‘How do you deal with them in the long term?”‘ – Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.
Have ‘we’ gone stark raving mad? Long term solutions are not incarceration, with over 2.9% of the adult US population in the ‘correctional population’ [1], (that’s 1 out of 32 Americans under correctional supervision [2]), I suppose it’s a model that has a certain familiarity, but what about all the drawbacks? Sadly the number of incarcerated adults has been growing. [3] Sigh.
It would hardly be original for me to point out that we might want to look at root-causes on our quest for the long term solution, not symptomatic treatments…
1 comment
Adam Roach says:
2005.01.03 at 21:44 (UTC -7 )
Flogging a dead horse here, but you did read my rant about Bush wiping his ass with the U.S. constituion, right? This policy is just formalizing a practice that has been in effect since Bush took office — never mind that it violates three of ten amendments that the bill of rights comprises.