Guantanamo Solution

It is time for some absurd humor again, and I have a column that I delayed from last week that I believe will fill the bill.

I have a wonderful idea to present to President Obama. We all know that he is anxious to close Guantanamo and put that nasty episode behind us. Most Republicans and even some of his own party members in Congress have, so far, bushwhacked his plan.

One of the stumbling blocks is that no foreign countries are willing to take the prisoners. However, our own prison system is unwilling to accept them in the United States. After all, what better place is there to recruit converts and fighters than our own prisons. So it seems there is no place to send the militant suspects so that we can close Gitmo.

Well, I have a solution for that, and it would take care of both problems. It would also have other benefits that current plans don’t address. No prisoner goes to a foreign nation, and there is no interaction between the extremists and the other people in our prison system.

We have an excellent prison in the continental United States that has been in mothballs (inactive) for over a hundred years. But it has been well maintained as a tourist attraction and is probably easily brought back on line to house the 270 plus militants, or extremists.

You should all know of this prison, especially if you are a student of history. The name: Andersonville. In case you aren’t a student of history, it is located in Georgia, and it was last used between the years of 1861-1865 during a conflict that some called The Civil War. Others used different names for it, the most common here in the south being The War Between the States.

Andersonville is actually an excellent candidate for the replacement prison. For one thing, it would be really difficult to outdo the cruelty and torture that took place there. The prisoners there would likely have welcomed water boarding in the 1860s. It might have been the only water they got.

The former prisoners would laugh at any complaints today about poor conditions or prisoner abuse. Andersonville was supposed to accommodate 10,000 prisoners, but toward the end of the war, there were 32,000 there. It should be fine today to house less than 500 combatants.

Oh, the side benefits I mentioned earlier... There would be quite a few new jobs created to restore the prison to its former magnificence, and then to provide guards. You don’t think we would trust the US Military to guard them, do you? There must be a good number of people of the Muslim faith here in the United States willing to guard them. They would certainly respect the Quran (Koran) and the religious rights of the prisoners.

Now, if the politicians are serious about giving those prisoners more humane treatment, where better to do it than at a prison with a huge black mark on its past. The contrast would be stunning.

Let’s get a write-in, call-in, and fax-in campaign started to Congress and our president and encourage them to support the Revive Andersonville Bill.

Our motto should be something catchy, like “The South Will Rise Again!” Yeah, I like that!