by RaeLynn Ricarte
If terrorists released from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, commonly known at Gitmo, return to their wicked ways, the Obama administration is warning that they will be subject to death.
Ohhhh, that’s a scary threat for an enemy combatant who believes that he will be rewarded with many pleasures after death for slaying infidels.
I wonder how many Americans will die at the hands of these evil doers by the time they meet their maker.
Seems like that is a risk our commander-in-chief wouldn’t want to take when Islamic extremism is growing in the Middle East and threatening international safety (remember the recent Paris and San Bernardino attacks?)
But then Obama made a campaign promise to shut down Gitmo and by golly time is running out for him to deliver.
This week, Obama released 10 Yemini detainees to Oman, five of whom were identified as “high risk” and five as “medium risk” when they were put behind bars.
In yet another example of imperial presidency, Obama released the detainees even as U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that a plan for closure of the facility will soon be presented to Congress.
Of course, it will be much easier to get approval for that plan if Gitmo is empty.
And Congress IS such a stickler for details when it comes to those pesky national security issues.
Like the fact that 30 percent of Gitmo detainees are known or suspected to have returned to the battlefield following their release.
For example, Said Ali al-Shihri became an al Qaeda chief after leaving Gitmo and masterminded a U.S. Embassy bombing in Yemen that left 16 dead.
President George W. Bush decided to house the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks and others at Gitmo because it would keep them off U.S. soil.
Bush worried that other militants could be drawn to stateside prisons if these men were held there. He was also concerned about our prisons becoming rich recruiting grounds.
Gitmo was a logical place to put captured terrorists because the U.S. had been leasing the 45 square miles that the base sits on from Cuba since 1903. It was repurposed from a migrant detention center to house militants.
At one time there were more than 700 detainees at Gitmo and only 93 remain — the most hard-core of the captured militants.
Although Obama refuses to call these men enemy combatants, that is exactly what they are.
I wonder why all of the people who raise an outcry about the treatment of terrorists at Gitmo do not seem to spend an equal amount of time demanding that Islamic militants follow the Geneva Conventions.
Terrorist seem to routinely ignore these war-time protocols when they are lopping off heads, engaging in mass shootings and dragging mangled bodies through the streets.
I would also like to strongly protest the fact that Gitmo prisoners are provided with better access to health care than U.S. veterans.
Americans who are so concerned about our humanity — including our president — should focus more attention on taking care of the men and women that we, as a nation, have sent to war.
by Mark Gibson
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp was created in 2002 during the Bush administration on the belief that the camp could be considered outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, and that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
Legal or not, this was a poor moral and ethical choice.
Even that legal argument was found to be false by the U.S. Supreme Court, which has since stated that basic protections of the Geneva Conventions (Common Article 3 ) must be granted detainees.
These protections prohibit: “Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; taking of hostages; outrages upon dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; and the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”
On Jan. 11, 2009, a Bush appointee asked to review practices used at Guantanamo Bay conceded that torture occurred at Guantanamo Bay on (at least) one detainee.
Ten days later, President Barack Obama issued a request to temporarily suspend proceedings and shut down the facility, a move that was blocked by the U.S. Senate, which denied funding needed for the transfer or release of prisoners.
Legislation was later passed, and signed into law, that stopped prisoner transfers to the mainland.
In November, Barack Obama stated that he is preparing to unveil a plan to shutter the facility and move some of the terrorism suspects held there to U.S. soil.
The plan will propose one or more prisons from a working list that includes facilities in Kansas, Colorado and South Carolina.
While it could be argued that Obama is circumventing the law, or Congress, in closing Guantanamo prison once and for all he is right to do so: Guantanamo prison is an offense to the basic values of America.
True, closing the facility will not change the fact that the U.S. violated basic human rights by torturing prisoners of war any more than closing the Nazi death camps erased the Holocaust.
We will have to live with Guantanamo just as we will have to live with the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
But in closing Guantanamo prison we will have taken a concrete, physical step away from the perverse idea that we can violate our nation’s principles if said violation is done in secret and beyond our physical boundaries.
With the closure of the prison, we will once again be able to take pride in the rule of law, and justice, by the United States of America — regardless of where its flag is flown.
And we will have the opportunity to prove, yet again, that American justice is more than talk but is a real and guaranteed principle of our nation —even for our enemies.
Equally important, those serving our country in the military or in the Central Intelligence Agency will never again be ordered to violate the basic rights of prisoners of war at Guantanamo prison – or elsewhere – ever again.
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