Friday, January 23, 2009

Obama-Dem Mistake #1

There are going to be many of them in the coming days, weeks, months and years (hopefully not too many years.) Major mistakes made by President Barack Obama, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party power in the congress. Each one of them is going to need to be pointed out and explained. Any number of sources will take on that responsibility, and I am going to ensure that this blog covers the worst of these mistakes. The 'Obama-Dem Mistake #1' began this week with the order to close the prisoner holding facility at Guantanamo Bay, known as 'Gitmo'. For those who are unaware, Guantanamo Bay is located on the southeast edge of Cuba. In 1898, the U.S. established a naval base there, and the 1903 'Cuba-America Treaty' gave the U.S. a perpetual lease on this area. In 2002, three camps were established on the naval base for the detainment and interrogation of prisoners captured on the battlefields in the war on terrorism in the Middle East. There were no appropriate facilities that were acceptable from a security standpoint within the Middle East countries where these combatants were captured for their continued detainment. There was also no way that such individuals were going to be allowed on to U.S. mainland soil, subject to American laws, and allowed to have the American judicial system available to them as if they had the same rights as the average American citizen. These were people who were actively involved in a war against the United States and the entirety of western civilization. They have already been filtered out and it has been determined that there is a high probability that these detainees have particular intelligence or information of a sensitive nature going directly to the security of the United States and/or our troops. Many of them have also been trained to resist normal levels of questioning and usual interrogation methods. Gitmo was selected as a location where these individuals could be kept safe from everyday Americans, and where they could be controlled and interrogated outside the reach of the American legal system. Gitmo has been inappropriately characterized as a 'torture facility' by all of the usual liberal sources such as the ACLU. It is also seen as a linchpin in the overall war on terror, which the liberal community wants shut down. President Obama was elected by these folks, and one of his promises to them was that he would shut down Gitmo and put a halt to any alleged American torture practices. In one of his first acts, he has ordered that Gitmo shutdown to happen within a year, and has ordered that most interrogation be conducted pursuant to the Army field munual. In many cases our intelligence and military officials will now be more restricted when interrogating threats to our national security than are our nations police officers in interrogating common criminals. And as Gitmo is closed down, where will the detainees, all of whom are genuine threats to Americans, be sent? The first recourse will be to attempt returning them to their homelands. But as this has been tried in the past, these nations do not want and will not accept the individuals. Will these individuals simply be released on to the streets of the United States? The ones who do get accepted for return to their homelands, will they return to fighting America? These dangerous individuals are about to become some of the first pawns in the liberal Democrat game. Closing Gitmo and restricting our intel resources is the first mistake of the new Obama-Dem administration. We can only hope that the ultimate price paid is relatively small, and not something even more cataclysmic than the 9/11 attacks.