Both of our previous president – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – expressed the desire to close the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but neither of them ultimately made good on that ambition. Bush released more than 500 of the prisoners housed there, Obama another 200, but the facility itself remained open for business. Obama actually campaigned on a promise to close the prison, but opposition both from lawmakers and from the Pentagon kept him from achieving that goal.
Our current president, on the other hand, has said much the opposite. He campaigned on a pledge to keep the prison open indefinitely, telling supporters that he was fine if enemies of the United States were to live out the rest of their lives behind Gitmo’s barbed wire fences. In fact, he made it a point to use Gitmo as a contrast between himself and Obama, vowing to put more terrorists away in the same fashion. While Obama was busy trying to get terrorists into the U.S. court system, along came Trump, vowing to lock them up and throw away the key.
And Democrats are still confused as to how they lost the election?
In any event, Gitmo has not been in the headlines for more than a year. That’s about to change, however, as eleven inmates are filing a federal court petition against their indefinite detention. In it, they claim that Trump’s anti-Muslim bias fuels his Gitmo policy, thus making it illegal under the Constitution.
From The Guardian:
The inmates are basing their challenge on two legal points. They claim that indiscriminate indefinite detention is illegal under the due process clause of the US constitution.
The second argument is that the justification for never-ending detention under the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was that it was needed to prevent committed enemies of the US returning to the battlefield. But the petitioners claim that justification has begun to unravel.
Okay, two points deserve two rebuttals. One, the due process clause doesn’t say anything about enemy combatants in a war, which is exactly what these terrorists are. They do not deserve and they must not be allowed to hide behind the U.S. justice system. This is the wisdom that President Bush used to put them at Club Gitmo in the first place, and it’s wisdom that holds true to this day.
Two, the idea that it’s no longer justified to keep enemy combatants from returning to the battlefield is absolutely laughable. If anything, the state of affairs in the Middle East is even more treacherous than it was in Osama bin Laden’s heyday. ISIS isn’t the force of Islamic bloodshed that it was a few years ago, but how long will it be before another terrorist group pops up in their place? These radicals grow like wildfire, and their groups would love to have some experienced jihadists in their ranks.
Sadly, judging by the state of the court system these days, we wouldn’t be surprised if a liberal judge somewhere decides to side with the terrorists over the Trump administration. And hell, after they’ve been relocated to a nice home in Kansas or Michigan, we can make sure that their aunts and uncles and grandmothers and mentors all get visas, too. That’s what the Statue of Liberty stands for, right? Dumb, self-destructive immigration policies! Total surrender to Islamic ideology! No Trump!
Anti-Muslim bias. Get the hell outta here…
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