Paradise lost: Obama to close Club Gitmo
Posted by The Skyliner on January 28th, 2009Screaming at a Wall
Cody Fields
Cody Fields
Is it just me, or does President Barrack Obama not understand how national security works?
The New York Times reports that Obama signed executive orders Thursday to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, close secret overseas CIA prisons and restrict the CIA’s interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual.
“What are we to do with these people, bring them to the very place they hoped to attack: The United States?” Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee said on nytimes.com. “What do we do with confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his fellow terrorist conspirators, offer them jail cells in American communities?”
And thats just the problem. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) has offered to house former Club Gitmo detainees in his district, according to foxnews.com.
“We’re looking for some jobs down here and Congressman Murtha has been exceptional with helping us with that,” said Brad Geyer, a councilman in Connellsville, Pa., when asked about Guantanamo prisoners. “My constituents … would probably err on the side of enjoying the possibility of some new jobs.”
And that’s just the problem. The government doesn’t see the fact that these prisoners are being held 90 miles away from the United States for a reason. They want to kill every single one of us, and bringing them here would only provide their colleagues with a chance to break them out, costing anywhere from dozens to thousands of American lives in the process.
Shutting down our secret prisons will not help us either. In the name of “full disclosure” (which is Obamanese for free shots on the Bush administration), it seems President Obama wants everyone to know exactly where every jihadist we have captured is being kept, since that matters.
While we citizens deserve the truth, there are some things in the War on Terror that are better kept unsaid until a later time, especially where Osama bin Laden’s buddies are being held. Obama has failed to account for the fact that making information available does not just give it to your friends. Rather, it will put it a Google search away for our worst enemies.
And only allowing the CIA to gather information how our Army regulars can is comparable to making a cop kindly ask a third grader if he stole his friend’s glue stick.
The entire point of aggressive interrogation (and there is a difference between that and torture) is to make the subject feel like he has lost all control. It induces a sort of “freak out” state where the subject, now “broken,” will give up information. The Bush administration often said these enhanced interrogation methods gave us intelligence required to thwart numerous plans to kill Americans.
It almost seems that with the entire system of fighting terrorism undermined, it’s more of a question of when than if an attack on our homeland will occur. While I hope and pray that does not happen, look for the Obama administration to once again blame George Bush and seek to “understand” why it happened, rather than actually doing something about it.