Pelican Bay is not an island

Davenoon at LGM has a good reminder to those who fear "releasing jihadists" to maximum and super-max prisons stateside, that Guantanamo Bay wasn't selected by the Bush/Cheney junta because it is famously impossible for anyone to make the 90 mile crossing from Cuba to Florida except with the help of miraculous dophins.

But all that really needs to be pointed out is that Guantanamo Bay was selected because people who mattered in the Bush administration did not want to place captives anywhere that would subject their policies to another country's laws (or another country's willingness to care if human rights obligations were minded). Alternately, the Bush administration did not want to negotiate a SOFA with, say, Guam or American Samoa, because these were US territories were US laws would apply. Indeed, if keeping "terrorists" out of the US had been the sole priority, a site like Wake Island would arguably have served just as well -- it's unpopulated, geographically remote, and under the control of the US Air Force. But detainees on Wake Island would likely have received the very legal protections that would have made Dick Cheney, David Addington, John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales cry, and so the Bush administration elected to use Guantanamo. As it turned out, the Supreme Court was unwilling to allow the administration to do as it pleased; with Rasul, Hamdan, and Boumediene, the policy of arbitrary detention was undermined to the point that Guantanamo could no longer serve the lawless purposes for which it was created.