Here’s a clip from C-SPAN, with Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) letting Brian McKeon, Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, have it on the subject of the Obama administration’s headlong rush to close the Guantanamo Bay prison for jihadist terrorists.

The Left’s narrative about Gitmo being this atrocious place where innocent rug merchants from Peshawar and Herat have been plucked by mindless Marine and Special Forces goons and deposited there without cause is an old one, and it’s never been true.

But there is a criticism to be made about Gitmo and whether it has propaganda value for the jihadist movement. Those charges are true – because when you let jihadists loose from Gitmo, they become heroes and rejoin the jihad. They might be terrorists, or they might not, but they can easily find purchase as fundraisers for the jihad.

And that must stop.

These aren’t criminals, they’re prisoners of war. They’re irregular combatants, spies, assassins and saboteurs and by the rules of war are entitled to no quarter. They could and should have been shot on the battlefield and dumped in a ditch; the reason they weren’t was that it was thought they’d have some intelligence value. So during or after the time that intelligence was extracted from them they were brought to Gitmo.

But if we can’t operate Gitmo without the Left screaming about the horrors committed in our name, I have a separate suggestion: let’s carve out a place where we can leave the jihadists alone.

That place would have to be isolated, of course, and it would have to be a place where they weren’t able to export the jihad through physical or electronic means. It would have to be a place where Americans wouldn’t molest them or be at threat of molestation from them.

In short, we need a place we can dump these people, leave them to their own devices and be sure we’ll never hear from them again.

I like this place.

Montagu Island is the largest of the South Sandwich Islands, located in the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. It is a part of the British Overseas Territory, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and has the only active volcano under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom. It is located 60 km northeast from Bristol Island and 62 km south from Saunders Island.

The island was first sighted by James Cook in 1775, and named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich and the First Lord of the British Admiralty at the time of its discovery. The first recorded landing was made by the British-Norwegian arctic explorer Carl Anton Larsen in 1908.

The desolate, uninhabited island measures approximately 12 by 10 kilometres (7.5 by 6.2 mi), with over 90% of its surface permanently covered in ice. The volcano Mount Belinda is its most notable geographic feature, rising to 1,370 metres (4,495 ft) above sea level. It was believed to be inactive prior to the sighting of low-level ash emission and suspected lava effusion in 2002 by the British Antarctic Survey.

Just dump all the Gitmo people there. And when there’s a jihadist who a Western government deems a national security threat, dump them there as well.

Maybe they won’t live long on Montagu Island, but they’ll live free. No prison guards, no rules, nothing. Let them have the island and be at one with nature. That’s humane, right?