As we all know, President Barack Obama is considering dealing with Guantanamo prisoners by moving them to American prisons, thus shutting down the hastily constructed legal no-man's land outside of the jurisdiction of America, Cuba, or apparently anywhere else that the Bush administration calculated was the only safe place we could possibly house them. Give a suspected terrorist access to a shiv and they might hurt someone, but give them access to a single law and you may as well admit our doom right now.
As near as I can tell, the problem with the Obama approach is that these prisoners are far, far too crafty to be held in mere stateside prisons. These are not like our normal, everyday prisoners in maximum security prisons. They are not mere mass killers, or cannibals, or Unibombers, or domestic terrorists, or mail bombers, or Olympic Park bombers, or sociopaths, or murderers for profit or anything of the sort. These are terrorists. The very word invokes visions of unknown superpowers; who is to say that these giants of worldwide terror do not have the ability to mind-meld with prison guards, disabling them, or the ability to walk through solid steeel, or do not have nuclear weapons stashed in their prison-supplied orange pants even as we speak?
I think if we are to feel safe we need to craft something better than a mere Supermax prison. An "enhanced" prison, as it were -- something that even Dick Cheney could feel comfortable stashing a terrorist in, knowing full well that they would never, ever manage to break free. Something as secure as a man-sized safe in the Devil's own playroom; something invincible.
I call it Super Extreme Maximum Security Prison. If our President desires, I would be more than happy to consult as to its construction. For a fee, of course.
Here is what I envision: the first layer of security would mostly be a normal, maximum security prison, but with a few minor adjustments. All walls will be five feet thick steel plate, in case any of the prisoners have Hulk-like superstrength or have smuggled dynamite in any of the usual places. Instead of windows, large-screen, high definition televisions will show images of the Martian landscape, and the prisoners will be told they have been shipped off to Mars. The educated ones will abandon all hope of escape in such an oxygen-bereft environment then and there; the illiterate or stupid may, however, persist.
Awaiting any prisoners that do attempt to escape, outside the cell block and usual prison facilities (kitchen, exercise yard, guard towers, etc.) there will be a fifty foot wide moat completely encircling the compound. It will be filled with piranas, crocodiles, and full grown mountain gorillas wearing scuba gear.
Past this moat there will be another, similarly sized moat. It will be filled with salt water, and contain great white sharks, a representative assortment of sharks of other ethnicities, and more mountain gorillas, this time at the controls of their own one-gorilla submarines. Each submarine will be equipped with missiles, torpedos, and a catapult that fires additional sharks.
If any foolish prisoners are lucky or vicious enough to make it past the first two moats, they will be met with a third. This moat will be two hundred feed across and filled with red-hot magma piped directly from below the planet's crust, and also contain anthrax and perhaps some lemon juice. We may throw a few additional mountain gorillas in there as well, if there are any that were not able to competently master submarine training.
After this third moat, the terrorists will be met with a wide queue of normal, everyday American citizens. Half of these citizens will have been told they are in line for American Idol auditions; the other half will be told they are in line for the newest version of a Sony-produced game console. Upon any terrorist reaching this point, a designated lookout will point at the escapee, shouting "look, it's Paula Abdul, and she's got the only console!"
If the prisoner survives the resulting melee, they will find themselves within a normal, everyday elementary school. Being in solitary confinement for so long, the terrorists will have little immunity to the dozens of viruses floating around any typical elementary school environment; they will soon be rendered feverish, delusional, and blinded by the glitter of several hundred Hannah Montana-branded shirts.
The seventh circle of the prisoner's hell will contain more lava. Through loudspeakers, the songs from Mama Mia will play continuously. They will be accosted by an individual asking them to define ennui, and another who will draw a brutally sketched caricature of them, making them feel bad.
The eighth line of defense will be a sturdy gate with a combination lock. Since any bolt cutters or hacksaws in the prisoner's possession will certainly have melted into oblivion from the aforementioned moats of lava, a mere gate will suffice to confound most. For those that still persist, blinded and burned, a nearby telephone will connect directly to Microsoft technical support, which will have been previously provided with the combination in the form of an obscure technical memo. If the terrorists can manage to obtain that information from their designated support representative, all power to them.
To any prisoner that manages to survive all eight layers of security, they should be pitied, for they will arrive at the worst of punishments. At the ninth layer of security, the escaping terrorists will find themselves in the "normal" part of the Supermax prison that has contained them. Here the escapees, wounded by crocodiles and gorillas, burned utterly by rivers of molten rock, accosted by American Idol fans, geeks and schoolchildren, mocked, tormented and placed on hold for unimaginable eons, will find themselves in an exercise yard surrounded by the other inmates of their own prison, an encyclopedic collection of every kind of thug, murderer and monster that this great and noble nation has been able to produce. The hapless escapee will be torn limb from limb by patriotic, batshit insane Americans, and in their dying moments will, at long last, realize that America has bested them in even in their chosen life's work, psychopathy.
