The Buck Stops Elsewhere (well worth reading in its entirety)
The president insisted in his speech that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and enhanced interrogation techniques (which he characteristically referred to as “torture,” a term both legally inaccurate and morally obtuse) increased terrorist recruitment. In fact the leading driver of terrorist recruitment is successful terrorist attacks. That is what convinces the fence-sitters that radical Islam can win, and that Osama bin Laden is correct when he argues that the United States is a weak horse that will retreat when things get tough enough. The counterterrorism policies of the Bush administration prevented new terrorist attacks and assured the world’s bin Ladens that the United States was committed to their defeat. We hope that assurance still holds; if it does, it is only because President Obama, for all his unseemly disparagement of his predecessor, has picked up the tools George W. Bush left him and made them his own.
Read it all.
There’s an old saying: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
I’m thinking a revision is in order: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while pretending to be doing something different, but hoping for the same results.”
Or maybe that’s just lying.
UPDATE: The media continues to give a free podium to Obama-boosters, while giving little exposure to equally prestigious opinions in support of Cheney’s positions.
For example: Gates defends decision to close Guantanamo prison
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the Obama administration had no choice but to order the shutdown of the prison at Guantanamo because “the name itself is a condemnation” of U.S. anti-terrorism strategy.
These people who are now being held in Guantanamo have VERY high visibility in the Islamic extremist world. It is not the fact that they’re being held in Guantanamo, but the fact that they’re being held at all that is the focus of Islamo-fascist extremists…. not to mention European elites. Will either of these groups think that it’s all better now if the same people are still being held, but just in a different prison?
I would be nervous, if I was a guard, with a family, working at the Supermax prison in Colorado, if the Guantanamo prisoners are moved there. We know there are many Al Qaeda sleeper cells in the USA. Exactly what level of security is maintained about who works at the prison, in what capacity? If you were a prison guard at Supermax, would you want those sleeper cells to know who you were guarding?
The funny thing is this: those prisoners at Guantanamo have it MUCH nicer now than they will in any US prison. I wonder if they’ll thank all the lefty activists for doing them the favor of moving them out of the tropics into a concrete block?
May 24th, 2009 11:52 pm
I’m sorry, knowing that Obama is POTUS, is torture to many of us. Torture is a relative term. Water Boarding is not torture even in the broadest sense. The technique causes no lasting effect or injury.