Imprisoning Terrorists

I remember driving up Prospect Street in New Haven the morning of June 24, 1993. Fire trucks and aid cars were blocking the street and I had to take a detour to get to Sage Hall, the Yale School of Forestry. I later learned David Gelernter, a computer science professor, had opened a package which contained a bomb. While his injuries were not fatal, he was lucky. Gelernter was another victim of what the FBI called at the time, the UNABOMer, or as we now know, Ted Kaczynski.

Earlier that year, I was returning from lunch along Broadway when I heard hundreds of sirens and watches police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances careen through lower Manhattan traffic. It was February 23, 1993. The first attempt at bombing the World Trade Towers. That night, when I left the subway at Grand Central Terminal, there were armed National Guardsmen along the train platforms. Eery sight at the time.

Both Kaczynski and the militants responsible for the World Trade bombing in February, 1993, were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced in federal courts. Kaczynski and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade bombing, are now incarcerated at the federal super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado.

Recently, the federal Bureau of Prisons has established other prisons within prisons to incarcerate terrorists. So far, there are two Communications Management Units, one in Marion, Illinois and Terre Haute, Indiana. Among other inmates in these units are two of the Earth Liberation Front members who committed a number of arsons throughout the west. These CMUs constrict communication by the inmates with the outside world and closely monitor the inmates while they serve their sentences, but they are not held in solitary confinement as the inmates are in Florence, Colorado.

As the Obama Administration begins resolving what to do with the more than 200 detainees held at Guantanamo, Cuba, the politicians concerned about public backlash against these so-called "bad guys" have raised a strawman argument that these men should not be incarcerated in federal prisons because of safety issues. And President Obama has rightly responded by saying no one, not one convicted terrorist, has escaped from a federal prison.

If it is one thing we do well here in America, it's our prisons.

Today, the first detainee from Guantanamo was brought to the United States for a trial on his involvement with the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Our justice system is a model of fairness and impartiality. While there are many things wrong with our system, it sure beats what we have witnessed recently in North Korea or Iraq.

If this man is found guilty, he should be incarcerated in one of our prisons. They work well. Often too well, but that is another discussion. It is the role of politicians to help calm unjustifiable fears. In this case, our leaders are not serving us well by flaming the fires of fear that we can not imprison the convicted terrorists.

Post Script: After I did this entry, I found a piece on Huffington Post by Daniel McGowan, one of the more vocal ELFers. He is currently incarcerated at the Communication Management Unit in Marion. It's amazing, frankly, that this piece somehow managed to get out of the prison, which essentially shoots down my theory the federal Bureau of Prisons can "contain" terrorists! But it's an interesting read, nonetheless.