The U.S. is Too Liberal in its Attitude Toward Enemy Combatants at Guantanamo

With the talk of President Obama’s decision to dismantle Guantanamo, it seems to me that precious little attention is given to actual facts about the place and about what has become of those detainees who have been released. After excoriating former President Bush for years over Guantanamo’s existence, even the New York Times seems to recognize there is something unrealistic in clamoring for the release of more of these people when 61 of them have rejoined the fight against the U.S. after their release. In last week’s paper, the Times describes the questions surrounding treatment of detainess as “complex“ (A recent Timeswatch.org analysis sheds light on the likely reason for the Times’ shift in attitude).

Clearly, if anything, the U.S. has been too liberal in its policies toward many of these people, especially relating to decisions to release them. As reported last week, one former detainee, Said al-Shihri, went on to help engineer the deadly bombing of the U.S. embassy in Yemen in September.

Get this: the U.S. released this criminal from Guantanamo, to the discretion of Saudi Arabia, where he attended a Saudi “rehabilitation program” for former jihadists. He participated in the Yemen plot after his “rehab” (with rehab like that, who needs jihadist training camps in the first place?) And with Americans who make the civil liberties of terrorist enemy combatants their cause, why should these America-haters think twice about attacking this country and its interests? After all, they know that if they “succeed” in killing themselves along with innocent people, they have fulfilled their sick mandate.

And if they get caught in the process, well, they have nothing to fear. They won’t get waterboarded (heaven forbid!), they will get clean rooms, the Quran, 4,000 calories a day of healthy food, attorneys, and a bunch of dumbell Americans to agitate for their release.

My favorite part of the Times article  is the end, where the reporter quotes John B. Bellinger III, described as a top legal adviser in the Bush administration’s legal council and the state department. Bellinger describes the dismantling of Guantanamo as “primarily symbolic” and says “it accomplishes what we could never accomplish during the Bush administration.” In other words, President Obama and his administration will use U.S. taxpayer resources and extra time and energy of a multitude of public servants to move these Guantanamo detainees around in order to appease the loony left.

This entry was written by and posted on January 26, 2009 at 4:15 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: . Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>