The election results may have relegated Sarah Palin to media sideshow, but John McCain is still in the Senate and we’re going to have to deal with him crying at every possible opportunity. Currently he’s taking a cue from his Republican colleagues to make snarky comments concerning Obama’s decision to close Guantanamo Bay. Specifically the newfound concern for backyards.

We need to decide what you do with people that we can’t return to the countries that they came from. We need to decide what to do with people we know if we release them they will go out, as we’ve just seen — a recent example of a guy who became a high-ranking member of Al Qaida. We can’t continue to release people who are going to be leaders of Al Qaida.

So we’ve got to work through that. And to just announce the closure of Guantanamo without addressing these other issues, I think, is not the best way to approach it.

But finally, where are you going to send them? Where are you going to send them? That decision I would have made before I’d announced the closure, because I don’t know of a state in America that wants them in their state. It’s going to — you think Yucca Mountain is a NIMBY problem? Wait till you see this one.

There is so much misleading and fearmongering in these statements it’s almost scary in itself. First off, what’s this NIMBY business? Last I checked there are about 235 odd prisoners in Guantanamo. In Pennsylvania, as of 2004, the state inmate population was over 45,000. Even if you put the entirety of the detainees in PA state prisons, they’d be somewhere in the area of 0.5% of the total. Do you really think it bothers me that a few suspected militants would be sandwiched amongst the various murderers and child rapists? Are people more scared of a guy who was fighting for the wrong side in a war than they are a guy who butchered an innocent family in their sleep?

Secondly, this idea of “returning to the battlefield” is hazy at best, as ThinkProgress lays out. The “recent” example is one of the few that exist, and they do happen. There are, though, two incredibly important questions relating to this “return to the battlefield” phenomenon that seem to get missed.

1. If they didn’t get charged with anything, how do we know they’re returning to the battlefield? Without any actual evidence against them, isn’t it just as likely (if not more so) that an innocent guy got picked up and his three years of abuse in detention turned him against the United States?
2. If these 60/12/20/6/40/whatever detainees were in fact guilty, were in fact terrorists who were members of Al Qaeda, why in the world did they get released? No one, not one liberal on the planet, is suggesting we release guilty detainees. The question is how many of them actually are guilty. If one got released and went back, it’s like if a murder suspect gets off and then kills someone else. It’s a failure of the justice system.

In the end, this whole mess of closing Guantanamo Bay is overblown. As it stands, Guantanamo is a symbol of the United States’ failed moral standing, closing it will help rebuild. It forces us to actually do something crazy: legitimately try the guys we pick up to see if they should be there. If not, work with them to rehabilitate them.

What worries me more than anything is that the Republicans turned Gitmo into a self-sustaining cycle. We can’t release them because they’ll go back to the battlefield, a problem that arose because we won’t release them.

Right now I don’t have much of a problem with Denmark, but you can bet your ass if I was on a trip to Copenhagen and the Danish military threw me in prison for four years without charging me with anything, torturing me along the way, soon as I got out I’d be heavily tempted to start firebombing a few government buildings. Hell that’s a Hollywood movie right there. Probably star Stallone or someone as the red-blooded American, tortured by a corrupt European government, who vowed to get revenge.