Guantanamo Fray
Following similar action in the House, the Senate voted (rather overwhelmingly; 90-6) to reject the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay detention center. The Left has made this a drumbeat for years, but now that they’re in a position to actually do something about it, they suddenly get all NIMBY on the issue.
Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that none of Guantánamo’s detainees should be transferred to the US to stand trial or serve time in prison. “We don’t want them around,” he said. “I can’t make it any more clear … We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.”
“Terrorists”? I thought they were a bunch of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time, dragnet detainees that the ACLU is just waiting to spring. But now Harry Reid is calling them “terrorists”. Well yeah, that does rather change the calculus on the whole situation, doesn’t it? If we’d only known then what we know now, right?
And it seems most of the countries where Obama thought he could pawn off these “victims cum terrorists” are closing their doors, after saying that they would be open lo these many years. Apparently, they were “just words”. So now, Congressional Democrats find themselves between Barack and a hard place, a situation of their own making as their candidate campaigned on, apparently, “just words”, but no real exit strategy from Gitmo.
But Scott Ott, news satirist at his own site and now columnist at the Washington Examiner, “reports” that Obama has announced a new tactic; simply declare the detainees as “fetuses”.
While accused terrorists have access to attorneys, and nearly-limitless legal appeals, a fetus has no legal standing, cannot speak for itself, and is subject to the death penalty without regard to guilt or innocence.
Civil rights advocates have pressured Obama to follow through on campaign promises to shutter Gitmo, but even Democrats in Congress have resisted bringing the inmates to U.S. soil for trials and incarceration.
“We can debate whether enemy combatants have access to protections under the U.S. Constitution,” said Obama. “However, no serious person would grant such protection to an embryo or fetus. The loss of 240 fetuses wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a nation where more than 3,000 of them hit the Dumpster daily.”
The president noted that America’s global reputation has been devastated by U.S. treatment of terror suspects, but that “our treatment of a million fetuses each year earns us nothing but admiration, and requests for clinic-funding from those who aspire to be like us.”
Sources acknowledged continuing White House debate about whether a terrorist who escapes from Gitmo alive can still be treated as a fetus.
Nobody, save for some right-wing extremists, could possibly object to that, eh?
Filed under: Abortion • Doug • War
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Heh heh. I’m glad that Obama is coming around to an, er, “reality based” understanding of the situation. But I’m also amused at his pre-election naivete on the matter.
Obama and some of his defenders are trying to spin that his approach is different than Bush’s, but Andy McCarthy over at NRO puts the lie to that with a post or article every now and then.
It’s interesting to note that Obama is closing the historical “national security gap” that has separated Republicans from Democrats in polls. He’s doing it, of course, by reimplementing the policies of his Republican predecessor.
Change, or not.