Leadership Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass’s line is the kind of calm, administrative sentence that quietly detonates. By labeling the “quality of treatment and care” as “clearly not” the central concern, he performs a rhetorical sleight of hand: he doesn’t argue that humane treatment is unimportant so much as he declares it settled, as if the moral question has already been responsibly filed away. The real problem, he insists, is “perplexing” logistics - “what we now do with them.” That “them” matters. It turns people into a policy category, a management challenge, a backlog.

The specific intent reads like damage control for an institution under pressure. In moments when prisoner abuse, due process violations, or indefinite detention start to stain the national image, politicians often pivot from ethics to procedure. The move protects the speaker from being pinned to cruelty while still shifting the audience toward a frame that privileges state convenience: not “Are we wrong?” but “How do we resolve this?”

Subtext: the political system is trapped by its own choices. “Now” hints at an earlier “then” when decisions were made quickly - capture first, sort out legality later. The perplexity is strategic; it suggests complexity rather than culpability. In context, this language fits the post-9/11 vocabulary of detention debates, where the unresolved status of prisoners became a bureaucratic headache and a rhetorical shield. Bass isn’t just describing a dilemma; he’s narrowing the public’s moral aperture until only policy triage is visible.