Gitmo On My Mind

One year ago today, a then-newly crowned President Obama signed the executive order to close the illegal combatant detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba within one year.

That's happened. Sort of. Kinda. Well, not really.

We'll get there, but first, let's hit the rewind button.

Ever since Gitmo opened for business in early 2002, the prison has acted as a symbol for hyperventilating liberals and antiwar protesters who bellowed that that the prison sullied our moral reputation around the world, was Bush's and Cheney's personal den of torture and inhumanity and has been used as a recruiting tool to create more terrorists simply by its mere existence.

Every last bit of which is unquantifiable hogwash and (even more) hateful liberal rhetoric. And it hasn't been liberal and antiwar/anti-US pundits who've made such outlandish claims with no basis in reality. President Obama himself has said, "Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al-Qaeda....In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.*"

Newsflash for The Commander in Chief: Al-Qaeda will say and make up any excuse to justify their attacks. How Obama doesn't know this as CIC is disturbing. Osama bin Laden himself changed his reasons for attacking the US and US targets multiple times: first, it was our support for Israel; then it was because President Clinton bombed Iraq; then it was because we had an air strip in Saudia Arabia. And this was all before Gitmo was even a twinkle in George Bush's evil eye. So when it comes to making up excuses for conducting their attacks, that's what AQ does: make shit up.

Second, Islamofacsicts watch what pushes our buttons. They are masters of exploitation. So it should be no surprise then that the AQ asshats in Yemen would cite Gitmo as a reason for their attack.

How otherwise normally intelligent people in the West buy into this game is....stupefying.

Next, there is absolutely no way to measure how Gitmo's existence has acted as a recruiting tool. It's unquantifiable; there is no way to measure it. Worse still, the logic is strained. Saying Gitmo acts as a recruiting tool is like saying that by having POW camps for Japanese soldiers (or even the west coast concentration camps during WWII) that those places "created" more soldiers. Well, duh. When you run out of people to fight, you need to find more. Believe it or not, this happens whether you kill or capture them. Funny that. But that doesn't mean the camp itself is the primary or even a minor recruiting tool.

But wait, Gitmo is more of a moral recruiting tool. Oh, please. Morals? Jesus H. Christmas, al Qadists kill innocent women and children without remorse. They strap bombs to the retarded, send them into markets, then detonate them. They've flown planes into buildings. Cut heads off on posted them on the net. Morals? That's laughable. In comparison, the fact that the vermin at Gitmo are alive alone speaks to our humanity as a culture. It's pseudo moralizing and unintelligent.

For all of the alleged horror stories that have come out of Gitmo, one might think the mere thought of potentially ending up in such a torture hell would be a deterrent. And maybe it has. Who knows, there's no way to measure that either.

I won't even address the juvenile claims that Bush and Cheney got off on waterboarding the likes of Khailid Sheik Mohammad. Those claims are sick and moronic on infinite levels.

Anyway, back to the present. On December 15, 2009, Obama issued an official memo to move the prisoners to the Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois. When that happens is largely open ended at this point.

Now if there's one thing consistent about AQ's numerous and ever-changing reasons for attacking the United States, it's this: They fucking hate us. Period. And I believe them.

Now, dear 2.5 readers, I ask you this: Let's take Obama's belief that Gitmo is a recruiting tool. How is changing the title and address to the middle of the country (at least it's in home state of Illinois) going to keep the "people safe and secure?" By his own deeply and dangerously flawed logic, why would he do this!? To make us more of a target. I have no idea.

Now, instead of this tiny and hated prison tucked away in the Caribbean, he's put it on American soil. Fab-u-lous. Maybe Obama should put a big Post-It on a Thomson water tower that reads "kick me!" while he's at it.

In the end, this is what happens when you start believing your own righteous and simplistic campaign rhetoric: You act hastily during your second day in office to please the fringe base that helped lift you to power, and raised the threat of another attack.

And that is very, very dangerous to us all.



* Why can't he just say "Yemen" if that's what means? Unless he does mean the entire Arabian Peninsula because, geographically speaking, the Arabian Peninsula consists of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Baharain, UAE, and Oman. It's an important distinction to make because in the context of what he's saying, Obama makes it sound like the very formation of AQ happened because of Gitmo, which is completely and utterly false. AQ was formed in the early 1990s.

Mr. 57 States is about as much of whiz with geography as Sarah "I Can See Russia From My House!" Palin, so he probably means Yemen and was just trying to come across as worldly.