Why Are We Closing Gitmo? Not For The Reasons Stated

06 Jan, 2010 by McQ

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It remains a mystery, to me at least, why closing Gitmo is such a priority to this president. In fact, it seems like it is the only campaign promise he actually plans on keeping, although to this point he’s been spectacularly unsuccessful.

But seriously, other than location, what does closing Gitmo and moving these “detainees” to a prison in Illinois accomplish? Does Obama and the left actually believe that doing so will kill jihadi propaganda about the prison in Cuba which they claim is used as a recruiting tool?

“Make no mistake,” he said. “We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.”

Realistically, all the jihadis will do is change the name to the new prison and it will be recruiting propaganda as usual. Do you think they really care where their fellow terrorists are held? Of course not – the propaganda value isn’t in the place, its in the fact that they’re “suffering under the power of the infidel”. Whether that “suffering” takes place in Cuba or Illinois is absolutely irrelevant to them.

And the Obama administration can run the best prison in the world, but the propaganda they seem so worried about will still characterize it as a infidel hell hole and torture chamber. The depth of naivete necessary to believe that closing Gitmo will solve some sort of perception problem throughout the world and hurt jihadi recruiting is rather disturbing when you consider who it is that supposedly believes it. In fact, the only thing I see this closure of Gitmo bringing is the expenditure of more money we don’t have for no apparent gain – not that government isn’t quite good at that anyway.

Today we learn that 20% of those poor goat herders who were innocently swept up in Iraq and Afghanistan have engaged in terrorist activities after their release. And we’ve supposedly kept the really bad one’s. Wasn’t the fact that they were terrorists the reason we stuck them in Gitmo to begin with? So, if we now stick them in Thompson Correctional Center and keep them “indefinitely” without trial if it determined that is necessary (as promised by President Obama) how does TCC become any different in the eyes of jihadi’s (or, for that matter, the rest of the world) than Gitmo?

The short and simple answer is, it doesn’t. All of that is a smoke screen. In fact what the move does accomplish is to transfer the terrorists from military control and custody to civilian control and custody and, by the way, into the US legal system – the real reason, I believe, behind the desire to close the Cuban facility.

[Crossposted at QandO]