RUTHFULLY YOURS

In November 2014, Congress voted to ban the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States. It was not a close vote. The final margin was 91 to 3 in the Senate and 370 to 58 in the House. Those are bipartisan, veto-proof majorities. And since those votes happened, Republicans have gained control of the Senate and increased their House majority.

Yet today President Obama unveiled a plan that directly contradicts the law. He wants to release 35 detainees and move the other 56 to a prison that would be built somewhere in the United States to house them.

In making his case, President Obama repeated the same tired talking points about how Gitmo has been a terrorist recruiting tool, even though there is scant evidence to support this proposition. Even two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady, dispute Obama’s contention. They write:

**Indeed, other issues and grievances seemingly receive much more airtime and emphasis than the detention camp does; and Guantanamo, when mentioned, is often lumped in with other controversial facilities—like Bagram and Abu Ghraib. Detention and abuse of suspected terrorists by the United States, in other words, is a readily discernable motif. But the contemporary propaganda narrative seems to treat that motif as but one category of offenses in a long chain of western transgressions against the Muslim world.

Accordingly, it is hardly clear that Guantanamo’s closure would matter much, so far as concerns the contents of jihadist propaganda. U.S. detention operations at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, after all, are now in the past—but that hasn’t persuaded jihadis to drop their invocations of both prisons in their online literature.**

Poplin and Brady note that Gitmo is especially unimportant in the ISIS narrative. What has really been a terrorist recruiting tool has been the administration’s weakness in the face of the Islamic State. But rather than announce a serious plan to destroy ISIS, Obama finds it much easier to score rhetorical points by announcing a plan to close Gitmo.

His timing is especially bad because, as I argued in the Washington Post, the U.S. needs a detention facility to hold captured ISIS leaders, assuming that we actually capture and interrogate some (as we should). If not Gitmo, then where?

A House bill introduced last year by Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity cleared the House Judiciary Committee today.

The bill details many links of the Brotherhood to terrorism, including the endorsement of violence in Egypt last year in response to a “war against Islam’s principles.” It notes that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain have banned the Brotherhood.

Not more than 60 days after enactment of the bill, the State Department would have to submit a report to Congress on whether the Muslims Brotherhood meets the criteria to be designated a foreign terrorist organization — and if not, explain why not.

The legislation has 28 bipartisan co-sponsors. A companion bill from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sits in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

At today’s Judiciary Committee markup, in which the vote was 17-10 to move the bill to the House floor, Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said he was “troubled” to learn that the State Department never considered the Muslim Brotherhood an FTO.

Since its founding in 1928, Goodlatte noted, “the Brotherhood’s strategic goal ‘in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.'”

The chairman stressed that under the designation “this administration would actually have to deny admittance to aliens tied to the Muslim Brotherhood rather than continue to proclaim to the world that the Brotherhood is a moderate and secular organization.”

We often hear the line from a Robert Burns poem, “The best laid schemes of mice and men, often go askew,” invoked when someone’s grandiose plans blow up in one’s face.

That may be what we’re in store for if President Obama’s recently announced plan to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and place terrorists on U.S. soil is able to proceed unilaterally without congressional approval. This time, the danger in the plan is to the American people.

Slowly over the years he has been in office, Obama has released numerous terrorists to other countries without adequate provisions to prevent them from returning to the battlefield against U.S. soldiers and civilians.

One recent case is that of Ibrahim al Qosi. He was a member of al-Qaida and a personal aide to Osama bin Laden who was released from Guantanamo in 2012 and sent to Sudan. He recently appeared in a video as a spokesperson for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

In the video, “Guardians of Sharia,” he calls on people to commit acts of jihad. Clearly his time in Guantanamo did nothing to rehabilitate him. He is the classic recidivist.

The fact that ex-cons often get released from prison neither rehabilitated nor transformed is nothing new. Recidivism rates for common criminals continue to be an issue for sociologists and criminologists to explore.

The Obama administration is prohibited by law from moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to the United States, but President Obama on Tuesday sent Congress his plan for doing just that.

Even before Obama spoke, members of Congress reacted negatively.

“The fact is, it is very hard to stop a president from doing something if he is willing to ignore the law and his oath,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) told Fox News Tuesday morning.

Issa said Obama’s plan to close the military prison in Cuba is not a surprise — he talked about doing it even before he became president.

“But the fact that he’s willing to do it in violation of specific law…(shows that) he has very little to lose, in his opinion. He doesn’t believe that the American people will impeach him, and with the death of Justice Scalia, he probably views that the Supreme Court might back him with a 4-4 decision.”

Issa noted that Obama himself signed the bill that included the provision barring transfers of Gitmo detainees to the United States. “But this is a president that doesn’t respect the law and the Constitution.”

Issa said there isn’t much Congress can do “in a timely fashion” if Obama ignores the law and orders the military prison closed. Congress’s recourse would be to go to court, and the courts are not likely to rule quickly.

Issa said that voiding the Guantanamo lease, which the United States holds in perpetuity, would be more complicated for the president to do. He could order the military to leave Guantanamo, but that places the burden on military leaders.

“I have to be quite candid,” Issa said. “It is the decision that U.S. military leaders have to make. Are they going to obey an unlawful order…to move people from Guantanamo? An unlawful order to close the base?”

Issa said he believes the military may push back on the president. “I can see flag officers resigning rather than obeying unlawful orders.”

Western states should legally permit immigrant communities to surgically “nick” young girls’ vaginas as an alternative to genital mutilation, a pair of US gynaecologists argued in a hotly-challenged paper Tuesday.
Such a “compromise” could allow groups to honour cultural or religious prescripts while saving millions of girls from invasive and disfiguring genital slashing practised in some African and Middle Eastern cultures, the two doctors stated in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“We are not arguing that any procedure on the female genitalia is desirable,” said Kavita Arora of the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Allan Jacobs of Stony Brook University in New York state.
“Rather, we only argue that certain procedures ought to be tolerated by liberal societies”, which have outlawed such practices but host immigrants for whom it is part of their culture.
Efforts to enforce an outright ban on female genital mutilation (FGM) have often had the opposite effect — driving the practice underground and putting women at even greater risk, said the duo.
But many peers immediately dismissed the idea.

History and recent trends are on their side without question.

There has been a large volume of contradictory statements by Democrats and Republicans on nominating a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

President Barack Obama has claimed that he is duty-bound to nominate a judge for the highest judicial court in the land, and that his nominee is entitled to an up-and down vote. Conversely, several Republicans have been arguing that tradition dictates that a presidential nomination and Senate confirmation for a Supreme Court nominee do not take place in an election year.

As it happens, none of these claims hold water.

Election year Supreme Court vacancies have been filled by Senate-approved nominees in all six occurrences since 1900. The President certainly has the right to put forward a Supreme Court nominee in his final year, but he has no obligation to do so. And the Senate is not duty-bound to confirm, or even vote upon, his nominee, election year or not.

President Obama’s push to obtain a vote on his eventual nominee also puts him at odds with a Democratic tradition of thwarting Republican judicial nominees.

In asserting that Republicans need to vote on his eventual nominee, President Obama has been compelled to publicly “regret” via his spokesman his own efforts, as senator from Illinois, to filibuster Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s nomination in 2005.

Similarly, Vice President Joe Biden must be regretting his public assertion in the 1992 election year (which can be seen here) that the then-Democratic-controlled Senate should refuse consideration, let alone a vote, on a hypothetical George H.W. Bush Supreme Court nominee before that year’s presidential elections. The fact that Mr. Biden was then Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman makes it all the more difficult for Democrats to shrug off.

So what is the history regarding Supreme Court nominees?