The Terror Factory
Bush Cheney’s decision to create Gitmo and render prisoners from all over the world to there has put America at greater risk. In essence, they created a terror factory where through torture individuals were remade to hate America even more than they were already presumed to. A person after enduring years of torture at the hands of Americans only to be released will spend the rest of their lives trying to avenge their treatment.
This is the position that Bush Cheney have put us in; a quandary that President Obama now has to solve. The prisoners, or rather “detainees” can’t stay at Gitmo but they can’t all just go home either. The Republican answer spear headed by Cheney seems to be to keep Gitmo open and keep torturing people. I am not sure why they think this is such a great idea.
Perhaps they want to foster an even greater hatred in people so they will carry out an even more dastardly attack than 9/11. After all, 9/11 has been the political rallying call for Republicans for the past 8 years. They are lost without it. I can’t help but think they would love to have another terror attack against the U.S. so they can once again stir up fear and mobilize Americans to support any military attack against any country justified or not.
Creating terrorists is nothing new for the U.S. Government. We did in the late 1970’s early 1980’s when we decided to support the Mujahideen in their struggle against the USSR. We thought it would be great if we could stick it to the USSR the way they stuck it to us in Vietnam. We armed and trained the Mujahideen. We also funded the establishment of radical Islamic schools all over the world in order to recruit more fighters to Afghanistan.
After the USSR left Afghanistan what remained are the Taliban and Al Qaeda who can thank the U.S. for much of their training, weapons, and success. Now the U.S. is entrenched in a guerilla war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. That cave complex Bin Laden used to use as command and control was built by the CIA. It’s not so much a cave as it is an underground bunker with what at one time were state of the art amenities.
Now we have these people, hundreds of them, who have been tortured by the United States Government in the name of the American People presumably to keep us all safe. We can’t let them all go but we can’t keep on torturing them. Many of these people will live the rest of their lives trying to take American lives in order to exact some measure of revenge.
Those who were not radical when they were picked up, hooded, and flown to Gitmo for being in the wrong place at the wrong time are likely now radicalized. I think we will have to remember that if another terror attack is carried out against the U.S. and a former Gitmo inmate is given credit, we need to remember it was George W Bush and Dick Cheney that therefore facilitated the attack.
If Republicans immediately begin to politically capitalize on that attack and return to fear as a method of governing I will have to wonder if Bush and Cheney knew what they were doing and actively sought to create the conditions that would ferment another terror attack against the U.S. solely for political gains.
Report: Ex-Gitmo detainee joins al-Qaida in Yemen
CAIRO, Egypt – A Saudi man released from Guantanamo after spending nearly six years inside the U.S. prison camp is now the No. 2 of Yemen's al-Qaida branch, according to a purported Internet statement from the terror network.
The announcement, made this week on a Web site commonly used by militants, came as President Barack Obama ordered the detention facility closed within a year. Many of the remaining detainees are from Yemen, which has long posed a vexing terrorism problem for the U.S.
The terror group's Yemen branch — known as "al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula" — said the man, identified as Said Ali al-Shihri, returned to his home in Saudi Arabia after his release from Guantanamo about a year ago and from there went to Yemen, which is Osama bin Laden's ancestral home.
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Al-Shihri's case highlights the complexity of Obama's decision to shut down the detention center within a year despite the absence of rehabilitation programs for ex-prisoners in some countries, including Yemen. The Pentagon also has said more former ex-detainees appear to be returning to the fight against the U.S. after their release.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, who heads the House Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said the reports about al-Shihri should not slow the Obama administration's determination to quickly close the prison.
"What it tells me is that President Obama has to proceed extremely carefully. But there is really no justification and there was no justification for disappearing people in a place that was located offshore of America so it was outside the reach of U.S. law," she told CBS's "The Early Show."
But Rep. Pete Hoekstra, of Michigan, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, criticized the executive order Obama signed Thursday to close the facility as "very short on specifics."
Interviewed on the same program, he said there are indications that as many as 10 percent of the men released from Guantanamo are "back on the battlefield. They are attacking American troops."
