Closing Gitmo Damages American Security
Many of the terrorists kept at Club Gitmo are believed to be salvageable, and are sent through rehabilitation programs to make them decent people.
However, as numerous returns to terrorism show, the rehabilitation program isn’t working well.
This video (below) examines the success and failures of “rehabilitating” terrorists from Club Gitmo.
Jed Babbin, former United States Deputy Undersecretary of Defense in President George H.W. Bush’s administration, says
“You have people who have to be kept in confinement because they’re dead-enders.”
Indeed. This is why we often lock up violent criminals here in the United States for decades: they are a danger to the public, they have overwhelmingly demonstrated so, and they are probably never going to change. “Wishful thinking” will not make them peaceful people.
Charging these animals criminally is of less importance than simply keeping them locked up and unable to re-engage in combat the United States and civilians around the world. We did not put most German soldiers on trial during World War II; our main objective was to remove them as a threat and keep them off the battlefield.
And given that our liberal courts fall all over themselves to believe the innocence of the clearly guilty (and assume the guilt of America’s defenders), Americans are much safer with these bloodthirsty beasts locked up at Gitmo than they are walking free after a failed criminal trial because the soldiers didn’t stop to read terrorists their Miranda rights, interview witnesses, tag the bomb fragments and maintain an inviolate evidentiary chain of custody on the battlefield.
As a matter of principle, we never should have treated issues of warfare as if they were legal and criminal matters. As a practical matter, the threat to public safety only reinforces the principle.
The farcical Clinton policy of treating terrorism as a criminal matter rather than a warlike attack should illustrate to us that such impotent exercises accomplish little while emboldening the enemy.
In making war on civilians and other countries, these thugs have placed themselves outside the normal protections of the Geneva Conventions. That is a choice they made when they elected to wage unconventional warfare, and they should have to live with the consequences.
Our inability as a nation to recognize these elementary truths–which sprang up reflexively as common sense a few decades ago–is more sad evidence that when a nation abandons its moral compass, not only can it no longer discern right and wrong in others, it no longer has the courage of conviction to even do what is right.
Babbin also says there might be hope that President Barack Obama’s reckless plan to close Club Gitmo might not happen:
“What we’re seeing now with Barack Obama is the great disparity between campaign rhetoric and reality. He has an executive order that leaves all sorts of flexible room. He’s going to make changes. He’s going to change his mind, I hope, because I don’t believe deep down he wants to hurt America. Closing that camp and letting these guys go is exactly the way to do that.”
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