Politics & Power Quote by Charles Foster Bass

Bass is trying to do two things at once: launder a controversial policy through compliments, and pre-empt moral scrutiny by framing it as naive or even disloyal. The line’s engine is the word “phenomenal,” a marketing-grade adjective that treats detention infrastructure as an achievement, not a warning. “Almost over-night” adds a frontier myth of American competence: we build fast, we solve problems fast, we don’t ask too many questions about what had to be skipped to get there.

The subtext hardens when he calls detainees “sworn enemies of America.” That phrase is less description than device. It collapses individual cases into a single villain category, making legal due process feel like an indulgence. It also helps explain the rhetorical pivot to “respect and dignity”: Bass isn’t offering evidence; he’s offering a moral alibi. If the U.S. is already being unusually “humane,” then critics are cast as impossible-to-please.

The final clause is the tell: “than they ever would have considered” if roles were reversed. It’s a classic wartime symmetry argument that doesn’t actually establish what happened in U.S. custody; it just asserts that the enemy would be worse. That’s not accountability, it’s comparative absolution.

Placed in the post-9/11 context of Guantanamo and “enemy combatant” logic, the quote reads like message discipline: reassure the public, celebrate the military, and shift the ethical baseline from American law to imagined enemy behavior. It’s political cover packaged as national pride.