Strangely absent from the public view has been outgoing Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, the fanatical authoritarian who is stepping down from a safely gerrymandered Michigan congressional seat for a career in right-wing talk radio. Rogers was a Sunday morning fixture for months as he defended the NSA Stasi for unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining as well as continued to pull out unsubstantiated allegations that former government contractor turned patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden was a Russian spy. Well this Sunday he has made his return to the morning slimefest to champion the US offshore torture facility and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The occasion for the puffy fascist's return to national television is that the recently abducted alleged mastermind of the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack Ahmed Abu Khattala is now in The Homeland awaiting trial in a - GASP - civilian court. Rogers, a real knuckle-dragger who used to work for the FBI Gestapo appeared on CNN's State of the Union to decree that Khattala was an "enemy combatant" - that wonderful little designation dreamed up by Bush administration legal eagles to circumvent the Constitution and should be thrown into captivity at the blot on the American global reputation at Gitmo. Rogers primary beef is that Khattala has to this point been "uncooperative" when interrogated by US goons and there is nothing like some torture and waterboarding in the balmy military occupied extrajudicial facility in Cuba to loosen his tongue and cop to the embassy attack.
According to a story in Politico (the actual SOTU transcript was not available) in a story entitled "Rogers: Khatallah process brings up more questions", Rogers who is a pathological liar for his history of bogus statements on Snowden and Glenn Greenwald makes the case for Gitmo as:
“Think about the sheer expense, the manpower, the planning to remove him from the battlefield, put him on a U.S. ship, steam him across the ocean to the United States to be presented to a U.S. federal judge, and we had to ask ourselves, is this, are we looking at what's happening in Iraq and Syria, is this a legal matter? Is this a criminal engagement or enemy combatants we need to strike and hold in a different way?” the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on CNN's "State of the Union."
If this tactic is to be used during the apprehension of anyone engaged in terrorism around the world, the Michigan Republican said, “we better start building prisons by the dozens." The prison facility at Guantánamo Bay is already capable of holding such suspects, he said.
Rogers said that the time investigators spent interviewing Khatallah on his trip over the Atlantic was not enough and that he has been “compliant but not cooperative.”
“You can't say you'll do it in 10 days or three days or seven days. Remember, he's affiliated with Al Sharia in Libya, which is certainly affiliated with Al Qaeda — these are dangerous folks. If he doesn't give us anything, and we get him to put him in jail, what have [we] accomplished? I argue we've spent a lot of money and not gained anything valuable for pushing back on terrorists around the world,” Rogers said.
Rogers is once again just pulling stuff out of his ass. Foremost is the insistence of using the term "terrorists" as an all-encompassing one to describe what are effectively religious militants, such is al Qaeda and ISIS (which the US to some degree likely overtly or covertly supports) who are engaged in civil wars as such. The entire pretense of the phony war on terror is bullshit in that "terrorism" is a tactic and acts of war in the myriad of conflicts that Uncle Scam is fueling produces an array of militants, freedom fighters, holy warriors, insurgents etc and to label them all as "terrorists" is dishonesty of the utmost. But Rogers knows this very well being that the Guantanamo Bay legal limbo and torture facility is ultimately going to house American citizens, most of them domestic political dissidents and opponents of the fascist system that gives Rogers and his fellow traitors a hard on. What would the purpose be of building a totalitarian system of surveillance and the militarized police forces that support it if there aren't prisons into which to throw the targets?
This is all going to be coming home to roost very soon when the political climate is just right to go live with the full blown imposition of tyranny - the trigger could be an economic collapse (which is looming) or that new 9/11 event that Dick Cheney has been making the rounds promoting as though he knows something that the rest of us don't. Either of which would suit Rogers and his fellow torture fetishists in the GOP like Ted Cruz, Peter King, John McCain and Lindsey Graham as well as the legion of lesser known although equally depraved authoritarians for they will be the ones who are involved in deciding exactly who is going to end up in those prisons when the time comes.
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