2009 Chutzpah of the Year Award should go to Cheney...
"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."
Not so fast, Dick. Did you forget the the Yemen prisoners that you and George released and sent back that rejoined AlQaida in Yemen?:
At least eleven former Saudi Gitmo prisoners who were sent back home by the Bush administration between 2003-2007 have promptly rejoined Al-Qaida in Yemen -- including individuals who made no secret of their intentions upon being released. The biographies of these men are all included in my NEFA Foundation report from earlier this year, "The Eleven: Saudi Guantanamo Veterans Returning to the Fight.” I reprint the conclusions of my report here:
In at least four of the eleven cases-Fahd al-Jutayli, Murtadha Magram, Adnan al-Sayegh, and Ibrahim ar-Rabeish-ARB panels in Guantanamo Bay specifically found that the men continued to represent "a threat to the United States and its allies" only months prior to their transfer from custody in Gitmo back home to Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, it is almost inexplicable that the U.S. government would even consider releasing, albeit, a mid-ranking Afghan-trained Al-Qaida recruit such as Yusuf al-Shehri-who has happily advertised to his interrogators that "he considers all Americans his enemy" and that "he will continue to fight them until he dies"-except under the most stringent of conditions. Or, alternatively, we have the case of Murtadha Magram-who boasted that had gone "to the jihad to die", that he "wanted to be a martyr for the cause", and that he "hates Americans and all non-believers." These hardly sound like obvious choices for early parole from Guantanamo... In at least one regrettable instance, if the account of the New York Times is to be believed, a terror suspect now thought to be quite dangerous (Mishal al-Shedoky) was released and sent home to Saudi Arabia from Guantanamo, primarily in order to help win Saudi political support for the botched U.S. invasion of Iraq.
That's correct: the U.S. military repeatedly warned the Bush administration in advance that almost half of the former Saudi Gitmo detainees who have rejoined Al-Qaida continued to represent active threats to the United States--and yet they were released anyway, evidently for political reasons.
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