A British Middle East Expert takes President Barack Obama to task concerning his foolish decision to close Gitmo. Who said Obama is loved overseas?
MY ADVICE TO OBAMA ON GUANTANAMO: WHEN IN A HOLE STOP DIGGING
I can't help feeling a sense of "told-you-so" the deeper American President Barack Obama digs himself in the mire over Guantanamo. I always thought his knee-jerk promise to close Guantanamo Bay detention facility was cheap politics and displayed a profound lack of understanding about the very real security issues relating to Guantanamo and its remaining inmates.
And so it has proved. When even the Democrats refuse to approve the $80 million budget to relocate the remaining detainees to the American mainland on security grounds, you can see that Mr Obama has made a complete mess of the Guantanamo issue.
It is all very well for the American president - as he did yesterday - to bemoan the fact that Guantanamo should never have been set up in the first place. The fact remains that it was, and it now contains the hard core of the al-Qaeda activists picked up following the September 11 attacks - including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks.
Given that one-in-seven former Gitmo detainees have returned to terror activity following their release, you can understand that Mr Obama has succeeded in the seemingly impossible task of uniting Republicans and Democrats against him over his plans to close the facility without having any workable plan of what to replace it with.
Perhaps there is an important lesson the president can learn for the future: think through the consequences before making cheap political points.
Con Coughlin, London, UK Telegraph, 5/21/09
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