Former vice president Dick Cheney will defend Guantanamo Bay’s usefulness and its existence through eternity. President Obama and Eric Holder are two of the many people strutting the bilateral decisions ideological fence in the hopes that some event, or will authenticate and/or validate their stance on closing Guantanamo Bay, eventually. Of course the conversation had been previously dominated by where to send the inmates, and whether to try them in civilian courts or to cut them loose. Of course all these options had their places on the table until the Christmas Day foiled airline disaster, and everyone is going back to the drawing board, except Dick Cheney. According to reliable sources, the United States has said it is temporarily suspend the transfer of prisoners to Yemen from the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
For the record, Yemen did not become a breeding ground for terrorist activity overnight (or last night), and for most people who had argued against cutting the inmates loose all this while, this is one of their worst fears. It is worth mentioning however that making my apprehension about the 80 Yemeni inmates in Guantanamo is only by a result of my own logical reasoning, that they could potentially dangerous, even if they are not who they’ve been accused to be.
On the flipside, although it would be nice to find some quick answers to the detention process and either prosecute the suspects (or cut them lose), Yemen’s resurgence on the terror watch makes it a tough sell for even the civil and human rights-loving radicals.
If I was the president, this is where I take a bold stance and renege on my campaign promise in confidence because any peace loving, life loving, terror hating American will welcome an ideological u-turn as the right thing to do. Nothing at all, no one can blame Obama for not shutting down Guantanamo as quickly as he promised during his campaign. If Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was trained Yemen to blow up airplanes, there is no telling how many disgruntled detainees would join the recruitment party if released. So, call me a flip flopper, or a Dick Cheney lover, but we shouldn’t be in any rush to sign any get-out-of-jail cards prematurely.
Honestly, I share the sentiment of both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman who have explicitly urged president Obama to halt detainee releases "until such time that we can be sure and be confident that they will not return to the fight." What I don’t know is how anyone can ever be “sure and confident” about a detainee’s state of mind. But again, that’s the reason why I am not the president; I don’t have the luxury job of figuring out the almost impossible.
