The president has issued his decision to close the Guantanamo prison complex down within the year, potentially bring those that will not (or cannot) be repatriated to their homelands to plunk down right here in Sunny SoCal. Two venues on the short list are Camp Pendleton, some 30 miles north of your host’s Crushing Burden of Debt, or Miramar, a mere five miles south. NPR reported today that we may even have to release a few of them to wander about in the USA, on the theory that our NATO allies have no vested interest in resettling these folks if we refuse to do so ourselves.
Perfect.
I admit to the potentiality of holding views heterodox the prevailing norms on this issue, but it seems to me that the only advantage that could possible obtain to liberating many of the Guantanamo prisoners is the chance to get them back in the cross-hairs again.
Like this guy:
The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.
The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.
Do you hear a buzzing sound in the distance Mr. al-Shihri? Are you sure?
Yeah. All that.
Plus- Obama is blooded now, too…over Pakistan. It’s Barry’s War now.
b2
Why Southern California? Why not ask Sarah Palin if Alaska has some room? North slope? In the tundra? Guarded by Polar Bears.
Yeah, you know, it’s be such a terrible shame if some catastrophe occurred when the prisoners were being transported and they all got killed. Tsk Tsk… tough luck old boys…
Right on, AW1 Tim! I mean, they have to be “transported” up, out or away from Cuba. Air or sea. One or the other.
Accidents happen. What do the guys in the control module know? Pakistan, Afghanistan, Cuba? Ocean and air looks pretty much the same wherever you find it.
There is a suggestion to house the critters down here in the good ole Naval Brig Chawls-ton. We’d love to get a few of them. A nasty rumor has already made the rounds about setting a bounty on their heads. but gosh, just a rumor.
Heh. Sen Kit Bond suggested reopening Alcatraz to house some of those baddies. He sez then they can be close to the people that are making the most noise about this..
I don’t understand why we haven’t been releasing them all along. One at a time. With little GPS trackers embedded in them. Watch where they go and then blow up the training camp they go to.
After a while, released prisoners will not be welcomed back…
@7 – How do you know we aren’t?
Sending them to The Rock is a great idea. There is already a burgeoning tourist industry offering visits to Alcatraz, so not only could tourists look at the animals at Fleishacker Zoo, they could look at the animals on Alcatraz. Of course there is always the threat of one of the animals on Alcatraz catching a tourist and killing him or her, but that happens at the zoo, too.
Nightly movies: Birdman of Alcatraz, Escape From Alcatraz, The Rock, Experiment Alcatraz and Murder In the First. If the movies encourage the new inmates to take a dip in the bay, well…cuts down on the ration bill.
” … a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists “?
Now there’s an amusing concept.
And about Alaska, just as long as you aren’t planning on traveling through Canadian airspace, okay? I mean, who in their right mind would want the foul stench?
Pixelkiller/
Don’t forget the Kodiak’s and the Grizzly’s, between them and the Polars we’d have ‘em surrounded. Hell, we don’t have to spend money on prisons and food–just drop ‘em all onto Kodiak Island–problem solved–also guarantees
the Bears a high protein source for their diet.
Do you hear a buzzing sound in the distance Mr. al-Shihri? Are you sure?
Sic ‘em, says I.
Schroedinger’s Cat,
Shhhhhhhhh.
How do you think that we know where the ones who’ve already been released are?
They go in for a dental check-up and come out with a tracker in a “filling.”
Don’t let the media know.
It’ll never happen. Obama hasn’t the political stones to risk it. He let’s ‘em loose and he becomes directly responsible for the inevitable recidivism, and the innocent lives lost to it.
And then there’s this, from Michelle Malkin’s site:
[A]s nearly 100 of the remaining detainees are Yemenis, reflecting that country’s refusal to assure security for repatriated Yemenis, note that AG nominee Eric Holder is a senior partner with Covington & Burling, a prestigious Washington, D.C. law firm, which represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo. From the C & B website:
The firm represents 17 Yemeni nationals and one Pakistani citizen held at Guantánamo Bay. The Supreme Court will soon review the D.C. Circuit’s ruling that ordered the dismissal of a number of habeas petitions filed by Guantánamo detainees; some of our clients are petitioners in the Supreme Court case. We expect to play a substantial role in the briefing. We also plan to petition the Supreme Court to hear our Pakistani client’s appeal from the D.C. Circuit’s order dismissing his case. Further, we are pursuing relief in the D.C. Circuit under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 for all of our clients. On a separate front, we filed amicus briefs and coordinated the amicus effort in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld in which the Supreme Court in the summer of 2006 invalidated President Bush’s military commissions and in which we have obtained favorable rulings that our clients have rights under the Fifth Amendment and the Geneva Conventions.
Covington & Burling’s Gitmo bar roster has included some of the most radical detainee advocates; see David Remes, who peeled down to his underwear at a press conference in Yemen to draw attention to his clients’ plight and Marc Falkoff, who published a book of detainee poetry and who, in the book’s intro, compared their heroic struggle to the Jews held in concentration camps and Japanese Americans held in internment camps during WWII. [One of Falkoff's "gentle, thoughtful" young poets--a Kuwaiti "cleared for release" and repatriated in 2005--blew himself up in a truck bomb in Mosul last March, killing 13 Iraqi army soldiers and wounding 42 others.]
The fact that Mr. Holder, while Deputy Attorney General, pushed for the release of 16 violent FALN terrorists against the advice of the FBI, the US Attorneys who prosecuted them and the NYPD officers who were maimed by them, suggests that he was perfectly willing to put politics before the national security interests of the country. He is not suited for the job of attorney general, which is central to the issues surrounding the disposition of war on terror detainees.
Alaska…in the middle of Kodiak country…fenced in compound. Unlocked gate. Sign that says, “72 virgins: this way!”.
Perfect. Just perfect.
Perhaps a long term lease on one of those big North Carolina pig farms could be arranged in the Stimulus package….
How about this for an idea on what to do with the prisoners at GITMO:
We could release them!
Yea, we could march them all on board a C-130 and fly them back to their home countries.
When we get into each man’s home air-space, we could, you know… lower the ramp and… well, return them to their homeland. So to speak. From, oh, say… 30,000 ft.
If they are moved to a USMC Base, why not allow the Marines to put them to work…
they always need somebody to clean the rifle range. !;-})
I have yet to talk to my friends who have to deal with the legalities to find out just what this means, but so far this appears to be limited only to GTMO:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090123/pl_afp/usattacksjusticepoliticsobamasign
WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama “declared an end” to his predecessor’s “war on terror” and began to heal the US reputation abroad when he ordered the Guantanamo Bay prison to close, US editorialists wrote Friday.
Obama’s order to close the detention facility within a year, end coercive interrogations and shut secret overseas CIA prisons sent a strong signal to the world and presented a new post-September 11 era, wrote The Washington Post.
…
“With the stroke of his pen, he effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush had defined it, signaling to the world that the reach of the US government in battling its enemies will not be limitless,” it said.
“In a broad swipe at the Bush administration’s lawyers, Obama nullified every legal order and opinion on interrogations issued by any lawyer in the executive branch after September 11, 2001,” the Post added.
#18, this is exactly what I had in mind, but only after we first installed the proper safety signage: “Caution: High First Step.”
It came to me last night in my sleep — the perfect place for the new Administration to store those pesky murderous Islamic terrorists. We should ask Canada [still basically our friend even with the problems of the present day] to rent us a few acres of Ellesmere Island, which is above the Arctic Circle, belongs to the Nunevut Eskimos, is mostly covered with snow and frozen tundra and surrounded by hundreds of miles of more frozen tundra, and build a retention camp there.
Wouldn’t that be nice? The little dears would never be warm again. Until later … and then they’d be warm, Very Warm, for Eternity. No raisins either.
Marianne
Not SoCal. Put them up in SanFran.
Give them limousine service, digital cameras and video cameras as well as the best internet connections. Let them cruise around San Francisco, checking out all the best spots. Then they can write home about them.
As far as Alaska is concerned, why overlook that wonderful spot out in the Aleutians, Shemya?
A cogent argument that closing GTMO is correct can be found right here . “In fact in wasn’t right and as a result we have accomplished very little of what we set out to do”.
If the man was willing to hold them to September, I’ll bet that many of the local gun clubs that hold turkey shoots would be willing to employ them holding targets. Donate the profits to wounded vets.