Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has a piece in The Hill's Congress Blog that highlights three of the terrorists who would be released from Gitmo -- and perhaps housed on U.S. soil -- if the Obama administration persists in closing Gitmo. McConnell has complained for weeks that the administration announced its intent to close Gitmo even though it has no plan whatsoever on where to put the enemy combatants housed there.
McConnell notes that
[One]reason we haven’t been attacked is because some men who are most likely to do so are locked up in Guantanamo. These inmates aren’t spectators. They’re the enemy. They’re the plotters, the planners, the funders, the ones who pull the trigger.
. . .
McConnell highlights three of the terrorist who -- if Obama has his way -- might be coming to a prison near you:
Thug No. 1
One of the men who’s locked away safely at Guantanamo is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the man who actually organized the 9/11 attacks. We captured him while he was planning follow-up attacks to 9/11, including a plot to destroy a West Coast skyscraper. If we hadn’t captured Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, he may very well have succeeded in carrying out the same kind of attack on the West Coast that he carried out on the East Coast.
This is a man who boasts about using his, quote, ‘blessed right hand’ to decapitate the American journalist Daniel Pearl. And he’s unrepentant: earlier this year, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad joined a number of other detainees at Guantanamo in declaring themselves, quote, ‘terrorists to the bone,’ and proclaiming September 11, 2001, as a, quote, ‘blessed’ day.
Thug No. 2
Another inmate who still declares himself a ‘terrorist to the bone’ is Ali Abd al-Azeez Ali, who served as a key lieutenant for KSM on several plots against the United States and the United Kingdom, including the 9/11 attacks. During what he describes as the, quote, ‘Blessed 11 September operation,’ Ali transferred money to U.S.-based operatives and served as a sort of travel agent for some of the hijackers. This man is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans.
Thug No. 3
Another terrorist at Guantanamo who is responsible for the death of Americans is Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri, who masterminded the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors in 2000. When he was arrested, Nashiri was planning new terrorist attacks, including a plot to crash an airplane into a Western naval vessel and a plan targeting a U.S. housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
And these are just three of many. None of them has been able to kill another American since they were "detained" at Gitmo.
Why mess with success?
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1 comment:
Why mess with success? If "success" means locking people up (and there are more than three people at GITMO, by the way) forever without a trial or any due process, than you have little to no understanding of habeas corpus.
In our system of government, our leaders are not able to simply tell us that someone is evil and thus should be held in confinement for the rest of their life. We have a court system. The highest court is made up of 9 individuals (most of whom are quite conservative) who less than one year ago announced that this policy you label as a "success" is unconstitutional. In a democracy, we do not lock people - criminals or not - away from the public eye and throw away the key, unless these people are first tried and convicted of a crime.
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