WASHINGTON – On Wednesday, April 29, during a news conference in the East Room, President Barack Obama declared: “We rejected the false choice between our security and our ideals by closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.” This is simply not true. He issued an executive order to close the facility by January 2010, more than seven months away. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama – in his naive enthusiasm to fulfill a promise that was met with standing ovations and rave reviews in the mainstream media during the presidential campaign – didn’t really have a plan. It comes back to haunt him.
On Wednesday, while Obama was doing a White House photo op with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Republican David Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, quietly removed Gitmo shutdown funds from the House Appropriations bill. fiscal year 2009. Team O requested $80 million for this fiscal year and the same amount for next year to cover the costs of closing the detention facility and relocating terrorists held there. Obey, one of the most powerful Democrats on Capitol Hill, justified the defunding for fiscal year 2009 by noting, “I personally support what the administration is talking about, but as far as we know, there is no specific agenda for it yet.” Just in case the nice people at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. didn’t get the message, Obey added: “While I don’t mind defending a specific program, I’m not very interested in wasting energy defending a theoretical program.”
The theory that Obey is talking about is that someone on Team O actually has a plan on where to put the 241 terrorists currently held at the facility. So far, no other nation has volunteered to relieve Obama of the problem he created for himself during last year’s presidential campaign and by issuing an increasingly questionable executive order. So far, there has been talk of placing some prisoners in maximum security prisons in the United States, sending others to their “home countries,” and simply releasing prisoners who are no longer considered “terrorists.”
During debate this week in the House Appropriations Committee, Adam Schiff, R-Calif., suggested that we give the cold-blooded terrorists at Gitmo “the same due process we give our own soldiers.” No one in the so-called mainstream media has bothered to call Schiff accountable for equating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaydah, the 9/11 conspirators, with the men and women of our armed forces.
On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder revealed to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that some of those detained “will be released,” others “will be tried” and “some will be held for an extended period of time,” without revealing where or how it would all happen. This caught the attention of Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, one of Guantanamo’s harshest critics. She admonished Holder that she “would be very concerned” if she and other lawmakers were not consulted before bringing detainees to the U.S.
Perhaps Mikulski won’t have to worry about it. While Holder was testifying, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation to stop the world’s most perilous terrorists from being imported into the United States from Gitmo – or anywhere else. The bill, called the Keep Terrorists Out of America Act, would prevent terrorists from being transferred or released into the United States unless governors and state legislatures have previously approved such a transfer to their respective jurisdictions.
In announcing the up-to-date legislation, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said: “There are still terrorists around the world committed to killing Americans and destroying our way of life. Many of these terrorists are currently held in prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…If the administration continues…they may not actually be there here in the United States.” He then said: “We invite our colleagues on both sides of the conflict to join us because our voters do not want these terrorists in their neighborhood.”
Time will tell how many Democrats will support such a solution. To encourage the dim of heart, the House Republican Conference has released a powerful video online reminding those on the left who the Gitmo prisoners really are. After Sean Hannity’s show aired Thursday night on Fox News Channel, the network’s phone lines lit up and their inboxes were overflowing. The video can be viewed at http://www.gop.gov/detainees/video/safer. Meanwhile, Team O must remember an acronym Obama first encountered during his previous work as a community organizer: NIMBY.
