Guantanamo Bay - revisited

Obama's broken promises (to close it - which would be idiotic anyway) and muddled policy on it:

Krauthammer: On the future of Guantanamo in light of new recidivism numbers from the Director of National Intelligence: That is why there is not a single logical argument remaining. That the only answer here is to conclude that the Democrats used Gitmo as a weapon against the Bush administration to discredit it and say it was acting against American values. And they come to power and realize it’s the only answer. (A), the recidivism problem you talked about — you can’t release these people. Other countries are not going to take them. Secondly, Steve indicated that the president said it’s the number one recruiting tool, which is absurd. On the list of other [situations explicitly mentioned by al-Qaeda leaders over the last two years], Chechnya got 15. [Guantanamo got seven.] Is Chechnya twice as strong as a recruiting tool? Absurd. But lastly, al-Qaeda will always find a new recruiting tool. When the declaration of war was issued by al-Qaeda in 1998, the war against the Crusaders and the Jews, the number one reason [cited by al-Qaeda] was the occupation of the holy places in Saudi Arabia by the Americans, meaning the 50,000 American troops stationed there after the first Iraq war to protect Saudi Arabia against Saddam. Saddam is deposed in the second Iraq war and our troops leave, and al-Qaeda comes up with a different excuse. They will come up with a different excuse every day. Obama says Guantánamo is against our ideals. But he is in charge of Gitmo and says the prisoners are well-treated. No indication of torture. There is no implication that there is anything that the Obama administration would do other than what the Bush administration did — because Obama wants indefinite detention [for hard-core detainees] in Gitmo or elsewhere. It doesn’t matter. If it [indefinite detention] is against our ideals, it would be against our ideals in Gitmo or Illinois. So there is nothing left of this. It’s time that Obama admitted it. All he had to do is say: It [closing Gitmo] is mistake, it’s not achievable, and stop the nonsense.

Obama's reckless release of GIMO Terrorists -- appalling

We Interrupt this Socialization of Medicine to Bring You an Abdication of Our National Defense . . . [Andy McCarthy]

Quite intentionally, the Obama administration is making so many radical moves on so many different fronts simultaneously that it's difficult to stay on top of them all, much less give them the attention they deserve. But while we argue health care and Iran policy and a civilian trial for KSM and the decision to transfer enemy combatants to a U.S. prison, it's important to notice how dangerously irresponsible the administration's obsession to close Gitmo has become, and how tawdry the Justice Department is allowing itself to appear.

Not content with the Friday bad-news dump, the administration announced on the Sunday before Christmas that it had transferred a dozen detainees out of Gitmo. On its face, this is alarming enough. The Bush administration, it is freely conceded, released many enemy combatants, including many who obviously should have been continued in detention and who have gone on to rejoin the jihad and commit horrific acts of terrorism. That's how we got from about 800 detainees down to about 200. But there's a big difference.

The original 800 included some marginal figures (to hear the Left tell it, all the detainees were shepherds indiscriminately swept up by the Northern Alliance to win bribe money from the CIA). But now we are down to a much smaller core group — detainees whose cases we've had years to study and whom we've held despite enormous pressure to release them. These are the worst of the worst. We have an absolute right under the laws of war to hold them, and when one of them gets sprung it's cause for grave concern.

But the release announced this past weekend is just appalling. The twelve detainees have been transferred to: Yemen, an al-Qaeda hotbed whose government makes common cause with jihadists (and has a history of allowing them to escape — or of releasing them outright); Afghanistan, which is so ungovernable and rife with jihadism that we're surging thousands of troops there (troops the jihadists are targeting); and Somaliland, which is not even a country, and which offers an easy entree into Somalia, a failed state and al-Qaeda safe-haven. At least one of the released terrorists, a Somali named Abdullahi Sudi Arale (aka Ismail Mahmoud Muhammad), was released notwithstanding the military's designation of him as a "high-value detainee" (a label that has been applied only to top-tier terrorist prisoners — and one that fits in this case given Arale's status as a point of contact between al-Qaeda's satellites in East Africa and Pakistan).

And then there is the appearance of impropriety. As Tom Joscelyn explains, the Justice Department has taken the lead role in making release determinations — the military command at Gitmo has "zero input" and "zero influence," in its own words. DOJ is rife with attorneys who represented and advocated for the detainees, and, in particular, Attorney General Holder's firm, represented numerous Yemeni enemy combatants. Does Justice not appreciate not only how perilous but how unseemly it appears under the circumstances for it to be leading the charge to release the Yemeni detainees? And could anyone really believe that the supposedly noxious symbolism of Gitmo is more dangerous to Americans than is deporting terrorists to the places where terrorism thrives?

Obama Outrage - Is O about to transfer GITMO terrorists to Illinois ?

Outrageous. Disgusting.

I really hope this is not true.

Obama and Holder are just bad news ...


Obama's Weekly Friday Night Bad News Dump: Transfer Gitmo Detainees to Illinois [Andy McCarthy]

Andrew Breitbart's Big Government site breaks the news — in the form of a memo, dated Thursday, from President Obama to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Attorney General Eric Holder* — directing that the terrorists being detained at Guantanamo Bay be transferred to a prison in Thomson, Illinois (the Thomson Correctional Center).

It's an outrage. It will inevitably result in trained terrorists being released in the United States — bank on it. More to come on this.

_________________________
* Andrew's site describes the document as "a leaked DOJ memo" from Holder to Gates. But, assuming it is authentic, it is clearly a memo from Obama to Holder and Gates — the constitutional powers relied on are those of the president, not the attorney general, and the memo gives directions to both Holder and Gates. (Holder has no power to order Gates to do anything — they are peers, and the Constitution vests all the executive power in the president, not members of the president's cabinet.)