'Gitmo North': the cash-for-inmates scramble

And so, after years of "extraordinary rendition", false imprisonment, 3rd-party "interrogation" (i.e. mistreatment and torture) by people in countries with no recognisable history or appreciation of Habeas Corpus; and after president Gump Bush spent his entire period in office, and every trick in the book, denying Guantánamo Bay inmates any and all due process, incarcerating them without charge in an off-shore legal limbo, doesn't this news, about how towns with 'empty prisons' on the US mainland are now fighting to "win" the right to house those same Gitmo inmates strike you as ironic?

Before, under Bush, no expense was spared in keeping these inmates out of the clutches of any reasonable legal observation or purview - be that US or international.

Now, although it appears only out of a desire to attract the much needed revenues they will bring in a time of economic recession (sadly not any sense of wanting to do the right thing), the inmates will now end up being housed on US soil proper and, it is to be hoped, accorded all due legal process - no doubt a more straightforward proposition now that the morally bereft and politically dubious Bush-Cheney administration has been put out to grass. Full marks to Obama for wanting to close this outpost of cowboy law and mentality - a place which will forever symbolise the crassness, ineptitude, social autism and functionally illiterate 'two-wrongs-make-a-right' nature which so defined the Bush administration.

And of course, no story about Gitmo's guests would be complete without the comedy of its attendant irrational claims by Republicans, about how this move is a "threat to national security" - although, like most of their utterances since losing to Obama, they don't really amount to much other than their usual incessant partisan whingeing.

'Gitmo North': the cash-for-inmates scramble