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Red Coats and orange boiler suits
February 7th, 2009 at 03:09
Like most people, I was pretty pleased when President Obama in one of his first acts as President, announced that he was going to shut down Guantanamo Bay, the Cuban peninsula resort of choice for suspected terrorists and “enemy combatants” since 2001. This move has been welcomed since Guantanamo was becoming a bit too commercial, with some travellers apparently now preferring lesser well known “black sites” in Eastern Europe, in Poland and Romania.
Obama said that he’ll shut down the camp “within one year”, and this is an important caveat because he needs a year to figure out what to do with the people inside. Unsurprisingly due to this he has been dropping massive hints at the likes of Britain and Germany to take a few of them off his hands.
As a leading participant in the whole ‘War on Terror’ scheme, I think it’s Britain’s international duty to take on our fair share of detainees. Unfortunately though this will only shift the burden on to us: where are we going to put them? We need our own Guantanamo Bay to deal with these people. And I think I know just the place.
If you look at the criteria for a prison in which to illegally hold people for years without charge, then you’ll need to find somewhere a bit out of the way, away from civilisation, and somewhere fairly unpleasant, perhaps somewhere that’s a bit of an international pariah and a no-mans land – these are dangerous terrorists after all. We’d need to find somewhere which has accommodation just about meets the Geneva convention criteria. So isn’t it obvious?
We turn Butlins Skegness into Guantanamo Bay.
The camp site is almost ready as it is. All we’d have to do is give the Red Coats brown shirts and they’d be set for almost all of the activities carried out at Guantanamo. There’s a swimming pool for waterboarding – and a water slide to act as a reward for good intelligence. And as for the widely known practice of using western music to disorient suspects, then Butlins is already set up for this – every night the Butlins cabaret belts out some extraordinary renditions of the most intolerable pop classics.
I’m sure with capacity like this we could even take on and house suspected terrorists from other countries in exchange for a weekly rent.
And most amazingly? There’s actually already a precedent for this. A few years ago the Irish government turned a former Butlins site into a detention centre for a group of foreigners some people will happily conflate with terrorists: asylum seekers.
The only drawback is that sending suspected terrorists to Butlins wouldn’t exactly downplay any accusations of torture.
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