Guantanamo Idol

While Americans were dismayed about the way the Bush Administration created a new moral dead zone in setting up the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, they are now balking at solving the problem. Even though many are in favor of erasing the stain of this black chapter in our history, Obama's moves to fix the problem are being thwarted by Congress and many state officials that do not want to hold the detainees or release them into the United States if their home countries do not want them.

I have a novel solution. Let's bring them to the U.S. and put them on television. We'll have a combination of America's Most Wanted, Frontline investigations, and American Idol. In this show, each detainee gets outlined by government officials, gets to tell his story, gets to have witnesses tell stories, then the audience votes what to do with them. No doubt some will get book and movie deals, and others will be voted into Maximum Security Prison. With enough hype, the advertisement revenues for the story will pay for the whole detention and release process as we work our way through the backlog of prisoners. If we actually have serious cases with the prisoners, we actually send them through real courtrooms, but if we don't we just employ some American Ingenuity to solve the problem. After all, American Ingenuity was used in creating the problem in the first place. We bank on the public's love of reality television to make the scheme work. We allow the world to vote on it, since the overseas long distance will automatically keep the Arab world from being able to rig the voting (I assume we can protect against repeat robo-call-votes).

This idea is sort of an adaptation to an older idea of mine, where prisoners on death row or in prison for life could be given the chance to fight to the death in gladiatorial battles in exchange for some posh living arrangements while in incarceration leading up to the fights. I'm sure many of them would appreciate the opportunity to make something of their time, in any case, it would be voluntary. If they win 10 fights, you give them a couple of million dollars and let them go free. They have to pay back any victims first, but you assume that if they are a rich celebrity that there is no reason or ability to go back to a life of crime. Maybe you assign a reverse body guard to them, a guy whose job is to tranq them if they get out of line, and voila, they are recycled back into the arena and have to fight their way back out again.

The reason I don't propose the gladiatorial scheme for the Guantanamo detainees is that they haven't been convicted of anything and anybody that could fight their way out of that mess in this case was probably trained to kill by the terrorists at some point in their past.

All I'm saying here is that if we aren't going to follow the rule of law, then we aren't going to take responsibility for it and fix it, we might as well turn a profit on it and make a spectacle out of it. Who knows, maybe this will be a way to finally get Americans to vote for something that's important.