The Enlightened Despot

On Thursday, Barack Obama will announce the details of his plan to shut down GITMO by January 22. In the meantime, Senate majority leader Harry Reid is doing his best to make that process more difficult, joining with other Democrats to withdraw the $80 million for closing the prison from the defense spending bill. This money had already been removed from the version of the bill passed by the House, however, so the real damage was done by Reid’s bumbling attempts to explain himself:

“Guantánamo makes us less safe,” the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said at a news conference where he laid out the party’s rationale for its decision, which is expected to be voted on this week. “However, this is neither the time nor the bill to deal with this. Democrats under no circumstances will move forward without a comprehensive, responsible plan from the president. We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States.”

…

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Mr. Reid, said the majority leader had not intended to suggest that detainees could never be transferred to American prisons, but only to say that the Senate would not provide money for closing Guantánamo until a task force created by Mr. Obama presented a report on detainee policy in July.

Mr. Reid in his comments, however, was unequivocal in insisting that the terrorism suspects never reach American shores.

“You can’t put them in prison unless you release them,” he said. “We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”

That’s sufficiently incoherent that he is now certain to be accused of flip-flopping regardless of what position he ends up taking. But he is doing everyone a serious disservice by dignifying concerns about terrorists in American prisons. There are actual difficult questions to be dealt with here, but the idea that our prison system can’t be trusted to hold members of Al Qaeda is laughable. Being evil does not grant you super powers. The whole thing is a canard.

On the subject of prisoners who will be released, though, it’s worth noting that the New York Times gets Reid wrong twice in the few paragraphs I reprinted. Reid did not say - at least not in the quotes printed by the Times - that Democrats would never allow Guantanamo prisoners to be released into the US. Rather, he said that they wouldn’t allow terrorists to be released into the US. This isn’t just semantics. There are almost certainly plenty of non-terrorists in custody at GITMO right now, and, more importantly, there is zero chance that the administration was planning to say of any prisoner, “Yes, he’s clearly a terrorist, but we have nothing on him, and we’re thinking Lower Manhattan would be a good place to resettle him.

So, no gold stars for either Harry Reid or the New York Times today.

I’ve written about this before, but the Times has really hit a new low in stock movement new coverage:

They have since updated the headline, but this is all you need to know about MSM understanding of finance in a neat little package.

(h/t CWB)