WASHINGTON - The White House admitted Sunday it would be unable to shut Guantanamo Bay in the near future, even as it acknowledged the US naval prison camp is a rallying cry for Islamic extremists.
Nearly a year has passed since President Barack ObamaÂ’s self-imposed deadline to shutter the camp, but his spokesman said legal and legislative hurdles would prevent that goal being realized any time soon.
‘It’s certainly not going to close in the next month. I think it’s going to be a while before that prison closes,’ Robert Gibbs told CNN’s ‘State of the Union’ program.
Bambi, Holder and Gibbsie could have saved all of us a lot of grief over the last two years if they had been adult enough to acknowledge what was understood by serious, sober people in our country: the terrorists locked up in Gitmo are too dangerous to release, and they're not suitable for trial in a civilian court. They're not Americans, they're not entitled to the protections and privileges of our Constitution, and they're not common criminals. They're also not military prisoners of war and they're not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. We, the US, have been remarkably decent in our treatment of these terrorists, and if only that had been marketed correctly from 2001 on (which would have required a patriotic MFM) to the Islamic world, we would have turned some opinions there.
Bambi indeed could have done that: he, unlike Bush, could have used whatever credibility he had in the Islamic world to explain the humane treatment we were giving these killers and pointed out some verse or two in the Quran to justify what we were doing. We then could have held these jokers quietly and moved on. But no, Bambi and Holder made a complete hash of it. Now the progressive hand-wringers are enraged over a broken campaign promise (so what else is new, Markos?), conservatives and independents see that Bambi is clueless and incompetent, and sober Americans see that our country is more endangered.
Brilliant. |
Obama views Guantanamo, which conjures up images of water-boarding and other alleged torture,
| Because the MFM spent eight years trumpeting the allegations as fact ... |
as a prime symbol of Bush-era war on terror excess that only serves as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.
But his efforts to shut down the prison camp on the southern tip of Cuba have struggled as allies balk at taking in higher-risk inmates and prosecutions become bogged down in a legal quagmire.
| Not just a legal quagmire but a moral one as well. Release one of these dangerous jokers. If said joker then kills an American, what do you say to that American's family? |
Only three of the remaining 174 detainees have been formally tried and found guilty. Dozens have been cleared but no foreign ally will accept them and there is strong American opposition to any being allowed on US soil.
| And we're too squeamish to return then to their countries of origin because they might be tortured there -- and unlike the allegations of 'torture' at Gitmo, these countries really know a thing or two about how to wreck people. |
US lawmakers effectively blocked one avenue this week by approving a Pentagon budget that forbids funding for an alternate prison, relocating prisoners to the United States or sending detainees to certain countries.
Gibbs called for help from ObamaÂ’s Republican foes, who in January will gain control of the House of Representatives and trim the DemocratsÂ’ Senate majority after landslide mid-term election gains.
‘I think part of this depends on the Republicans’ willingness to work with the administration on this,’ he said.
| The same Republicans that Bambi and the Dhimmicrats have been describing as practically enemies of the state? Remember 'I won'? That meant you didn't need the Pubs. You could have used your control of both houses to fix this but for some strange reason -- perhaps the remaining sanity in a few Dems -- that didn't happen. Now you want the Pubs to 'work with the administration'. I don't think so. |
‘Are they willing to listen to others in the national security arena that have told us and will tell them and have, quite frankly, told the public that Al Qaeda recruits young people to do harm, to try to blow up airplanes, to blow up themselves and kill others, they use that as a recruiting tool?’
Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, was in talks that eventually broke off with the White House for a negotiated solution.
Gibbs appeared to acknowledge a draft executive order — previously only mentioned anonymously by officials — to formalize the indefinite detention of some Guantanamo detainees but allow them to challenge their incarceration.
‘Some would be tried in federal courts, as we’ve seen done in the past. Some would be tried in military commissions, likely spending the rest of their lives in a maximum security prison that nobody, including terrorists, have ever escaped from,’ he said.
‘And some, regrettably, will have to be indefinitely detained.’
| Why is it regrettable to detain indefinitely people who want mass numbers of Americans killed? We detain a few people in a regular prison indefinitely: there are murderers and rapists who will never be released. Why is it regrettable to detain terrorists? |
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