Cluster at Gitmo

 

 

"The people who were sent here are not Boy Scouts. They are America haters through and through..."

Yesterday the big local news story was a shoot out between a bad guy and the police. Under any circumstances, this is big news. But what made this one particularly newsworthy, was the man involved in the shootout is a convicted murderer. The question begs to be asked, why was he not in jail? Answer - he was let out early with conditions. Conditions like being on parole. Because he is a bad apple, he ignored his conditions. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and the rest is history. It was very fortunate with all the rounds being fired that nobody was killed. The bad guy, although wounded, is back in cuffs.

As William March wrote in his 1954 novel, some people are just "bad seeds". The man in the shootout is a "bad seed". He should have never seen the light of day again. Now I will change gears to our dwindling prison population in Gitmo. To have earned a ticket to Club Gitmo (as Rush calls it), you had to be the worst of the worst. You had to hate America so much, you vowed destruction to it and all who live here. These people in Gitmo are not  innocent bystanders to violence, they are the architects of it.

Our Commander in Chief has a soft spot in his hard for these Gitmo prisoners. Why, I have no idea. So, he has vowed to close down Gitmo and release these fine folks so they can go back to the family farm and help out. WRONG! Our intelligence folks figure that 20 to 30 of these "bad seeds" who have recently released have made their way to the battlefield in Syria. You know, the choir boys of ISIL. The group that loves to kill innocent men, women and children in the more barbaric ways. The group who has all but killed the Christian church in that area of the world.

Even knowing that some of the former residents of Gitmo make it back to the battlefield, POTUS released five more yesterday. The five released, two from Tunisia and three from Somalia all have ties to Al Qaeda. They were not released back to their homeland, but to Kazakhstan for resettlement. Not prisoners, but to resettle. Any guesses on how long they will be in that country?

Here is the bottom line. After 9/11, the face of warfare changed. We went into a mode of asymmetrical warfare. It was the rise of the stateless warrior. No uniforms, no rules, no country, and as far as I am concerned, no Geneva Convention mandates. We needed to treat these people not as a law enforcement problem - we needed to treat them as enemy combatants. For what they did to our country, we could have, or should have, shot them on sight.

But we still don't get it. And the one who gets it the least is our President. Just because we decided we don't want to play, means nothing to the other side. Taking our defense off the field is not going to stop the other side from scoring at will. As much as I hate to say this, it might have to be another attack before our Left really "gets it". These people want us dead, our way of life destroyed. Nothing on that has changed since the day before 9/11.

When the new Congress takes over next month, I will be writing letters to representatives to ensure the Gitmo released detainees are tracked. We need to know where these killers are. We need to know as one of them has said, "I will see you in New York." We just need to know. We all have the need to know.