Lindsey Graham to Screw-up Gitmo...Too

Sen. Lindsay Graham (RINO-SC) was part of the Gang of 14 disaster that cost George Bush a lot of good judicial candidates, and now according to Andy McCarthy he's planning to do for Gitmo what he did for conservative judges:

It's the Gang of 14 revisited.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham and the White House are close to a deal that would close Guantanamo Bay in exchange for some amorphous concessions on the legal proceedings to which terrorist detainees will be subjected.

The Journal says two other Senate Republicans (not identified) are prepared to join Graham in breaking ranks, which ensures that the pact will be filibuster-proof.

There's not much more I can say beyond what I've already said (see here and here) about what a disaster this will be for our national security. Sen. Graham will try to spin it as a great result — just as the Gang of 14 compromise was spun, despite its acquiescence in the Left's torpedoing of several qualified Bush nominees, leaving unfilled slots that Obama is now filling with his kind of juidges. It will be a terrible result.

The good parts of the deal will be either things we'd have gotten anyway (like no civilian trial for KSM) or unenforceable (like promises that the Obama administration will be more open to using options other than the criminal justice system for top terrorists). The bad parts will be horrific, and no matter what Sen. Graham says, he can't do a thing about them: The place or places where the terrorists are held will become targets that we will have to spend tons of money to protect; the tons of money we have already spent to make Gitmo a first-rate, ideally secured facility, will be lost; and, most significantly, the physical presence in the U.S. of the detainees will mean they are unquestionably in the jurisdiction of the federal courts, where judges will be able to say the Constitution requires all sorts of remedies, including release.

And remember, alll of this will be based on the fiction that Gitmo foments anti-U.S. terrorism — and to the extent the U.S. reputation in the world has been tarnished, much more of that has been done by the politicians who've attacked Gitmo than by the facility itself, which is a model.

It's hard to understand how one politician can be really good on certain issues and really, really bad on too many others. Closing Gitmo will not make America safer, nor will it improve our image in the world. It will simply make us look stupid in the long run.