GIDEON KING: HAS ANYONE THOUGHT DEEPLY ABOUT GITMO LATELY?
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/has-anyone-thought-deeply-about-gitmo-lately?f=puball
Has anyone thought deeply about Gitmo lately? The leader of our nation is taking action that may very well endanger our lives, and more importantly the lives of our children.
On March 7th, 2011 it was established that Executive Order 13567 would be carried out under the framework of section 1023 of the National Defense Authorization Act. A Periodic Review Board process was established wherein government-appointed officials examine whether or not Guantanamo detainees continue to pose a threat to our country. Each detainee is appointed a personal representative and witnesses may provide testimony at the behest of any relevant party.
Once a recommendation is made, a review committee will determine whether it is warranted to keep a detainee in “law of war detention.” The review committee is made up of the Secretary Of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The very first review was completed on or about January 9, 2014; it was determined that Mahmud Abd Al Aziz Al Mujahid was no longer a threat to our country. He is known as a member of the “Dirty Thirty” which included 30 UBL bodyguards. He is a committed jihadist, originally recruited by Yemeni Shaykhs.
He has familial ties to UBL. He was trained at the al-Qaida al-Faruq training camp. He was present in fights against the U.S. in Tora Bora and is reported to have had knowledge of planned terrorist attacks. A hearty congratulations to the team that is letting this demonstrably militant enemy of our state go
free (I couldn’t think of another way to express my sense of desperate sarcasm).
Wait, more congratulations are in order.
The Periodic Review Board has helped to clear 78 of the remaining 149 prisoners and more hearings are to come. The prisoners are claiming psychosocial reform. They have cited yoga and Martin Luther King books as their inspiration for moral enlightenment. They profess a desire to get back to farming with their families.
Intelligence officials admit they are very limited in ability to track released prisoners. There is vast evidence that roughly 1 out of 3 prisoners returns to war against us; Obama’s own director of intelligence noted that 178 of the 614 prisoners transferred away from the prison have re-engaged in terrorism including the Benghazi attacks, numerous roadside attacks, and other high profile misdeeds. One of the five Taliban prisoners recently released in exchanged for Bergdahl has already pledged to rejoin the fight against us.
Obama is not by any means squarely to be blamed for the misguided release of those who would kill us. George Bush Junior released 500 Gitmo detainees. But it is Obama, in a fit of moral indignation that only graduates of our finest Ivy League institutions can gin up, that made it his raison d’etre to shut Gitmo
down.
It is Obama who issued executive order 13567. It is Obama who recently released a commonly alleged traitor to the U.S. Army in exchange for human dirt. Obama is the architect of the institutional process to free these bastards.
Without doubt Obama raised legitimate human rights issues when decrying the behavior of the top brass at Gitmo. But one should seriously question why it is so terribly important for Obama to free the Gitmo prisoners. If his respect for the law is so fierce then we must be missing something, as he has subverted the law on numerous occasions in reversing elements of the ACA, illegally circumventing (as Dianne Feinstein recently pointed out) the process by which Congress approves prisoner swaps, trampling on settled bankruptcy laws to appease unions during the impending insolvency of General Motors, and presiding over an administration that is addicted to hyperbole, prevarication, and poor comportment in Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the V.A. flap, the Internal Revenue Service scandal, and so much more.
Why is Obama so deeply committed to freeing these prisoners? Just plain why? We don’t have many detained and we have hundreds of thousands of people in jail for minor violation at the tax payer’s
expense. XXX
One hopes the explanation is that he is just not a serious man—that his puerile obsession with left wing peccadilloes such as carbon emissions, Gitmo human rights violations(I know I know I know those are serious issues and I wouldn’t like it if my son was subjected to such indignations), equal treatment
in the White House(notwithstanding that this is already settled law and that the document he signed in one of his morally righteous spasms brought on by low approval ratings was a cosmetic limp paper with no effect whatever), eclipses what should be his focus on the fact that the world is burning around us with the profusion of radicalism from Latin America to the Middle East to Florida to United States jail cells, and on the fact that America is spending itself into oblivion.
Put another way, pounding the proverbial table over a series of issues which get people excited but which are not elemental to the standard of living of our citizenry and our national security, is easy populist pickings for a man too small to tackle the truly existential and thorny issues of our time such as
radicalism, national security, sluggish GDP growth, and the fact that too many citizens are becoming economic wards of the state.
It is ever so comfy to whip the populace up into moral indignation in a diversionary tactic that shifts
focus away from our slippage as a world leader on so many fronts. We are mired in politically explosive and psychologically radioactive dialogue about income inequality and the Keystone pipeline and Obama is vociferous about these issues because they are easy fodder for ideological division.
Yet, as radicals reabsorb Iraq into their fold, Obama is surprisingly silent. We telegraph our departure from every war, pay the consequences for such a silly public projection, and then slip into quiescence when everything we worked for dissolves into chaos.
We walk on the hot coals of politically correct polite fictions about income inequality but neglect to point out that income inequality is more aptly measured by the disparity in what one member of society can consume of goods and services versus another member of society. In dollars, the disparity has grown, no doubt, but what can be bought is what counts, as billions of dollars does nobody any good if they live out in the middle of the ocean where no consumable goods and services are available.
The gap between rich and poor is actually narrowing when one analyzes the issue through the revealing lens of relative buying/consuming power. If only we had a serious man or woman at the helm! Then at least we would introduce some balance into our national dialogue. Either he is not sophisticated enough for this balance, or it does not serve his political bent well to do other than take bellows to the flame of our divisions. He should get a rebate from Harvard or be excoriated for having a disingenuous soul.
If he is not a serious man, that’s a shame. If there is another explanation for his willingness to engage in things that seem inapposite to our desire to protect our nation from attack, then his hideous approval ratings should be even worse.
That he is a bad leader presiding over a mendacious and craven White House is obvious(how many lies has the press confirmed now? one needs a math degree to count that high)…….but what truly are the intentions of a man that is so passionate about the release of our worst enemies? And knowing how
vulnerable New York City and the rest of our country is to attack , should we be worried that Obama does not have the best interest of our children in mind as he releases those who would harm them. The Bergdahl deal is perverse on so many levels it is almost not addressable.
No doubt, some that read this will stomp on my words as gross oversimplifications and misguided accusations. But even Shakespeare had it wrong sometimes, for things are often as they appear. And it appears to me that our president is “hard at it” when it comes to freeing our enemies and dividing
us as a nation.
What should we do with Gitmo detainees? That’s a discussion better had offline.
Gideon King is a partner at Loeb King Capital Management.
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