Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, issued the administration’s lame excuse for releasing terrorists from Guantanamo Bay, saying: “It would be unwise to neglect the fact that the prison at Guantanamo Bay continues to inspire violent acts around the globe.”

(One of the real reasons is that Obama wants to empty the prison so he can return the territory to Cuba’s Communist regime. Another is that he is emotionally pro-Islam as well as pro-Communist.)

Here Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) debunks the excuse with admirable bluntness:

At Guantanamo Bay, prisoners of war are treated unjustly – by being treated far too well.

A punishment should fit the offense. If it’s too harsh, justice isn’t served; and if it’s too lenient, justice isn’t served.

Enemy combatants taken prisoner in the midst of war should not be tried as civilians. They should be held until the hostilities are over then returned to their country. If they are to be tried – for committing atrocities say – it should be by a military court as soon as possible after their capture. Executions should be carried out  by firing squad. (Not by boiling them in oil, great as the temptation to do so might be when they’re terrorists.)

While captive they should all be locked up for 23 hours a day; have no privacy, yet very little company; have no entertainment except books; and be fed on whatever their captors consider adequate for keeping them alive.

If information needs to be extracted from them against their will, physical torture should not be used because no one wants a world in which it’s okay deliberately to inflict physical pain; but humiliation could be effective – especially with those who come from a primitive “honor” society.

But at Guantanamo, the prisoners are indulged to the point of being coddled, and even treated with respect!

And the more they are indulged and respected, the more they complain.

This is from an Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

Earlier this week, the New York Times published a tear-jerker column penned by none other than Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard.

The paper gave Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel a national forum to whine about supposed mistreatment at Guantanamo.

“Gitmo is killing me,” claimed the Times’ new “op-ed contributor.” In fact, Moqbel is trying to kill himself. It’s the prison hospital that’s keeping him alive. He gets round-the-clock feedings by nurses he spits on.

The al-Qaida operative vows not to eat until his captors release him and “restore my dignity.” No doubt that will be achieved by rejoining the Islamic jihad in Afghanistan.

The Times editors, apparently doubling as ACLU activists, worked with the terrorist’s lawyers to get out his sob story. They even tasked an illustrator to depict a gaunt Moqbel strangled by feeding tubes.

He and other detainees responsible for the deaths of 3,000 Americans in the Mideast are finding a sympathetic ear inside the administration and media for their incessant bellyaching about how conditions at Gitmo are “killing” them.

Only, these same poor, abused prisoners have 20-hour access to a new $750,000 soccer field and state-of-the art fitness equipment, as well as their own Muslim chef cooking Islamic meals for them after they work up an appetite at Club Gitmo.

The detainees now have three recreational facilities — an indoor rec yard, an outdoor rec yard and a new soccer field. Special passageways let them pass into the rec yards without being escorted by the military.

And yes, you the taxpayer are paying for all this.

The terrorists also are issued prayer beads and rugs and called to prayer five times a day in Arabic. No one is allowed to interrupt them while they bow to Mecca.

We even point them in the right direction with helpful black arrows affixed to their cell floors. They get their choice of Islamic books and videos stocked by a Muslim librarian. They even have their own clerics to preach to them in Arabic.

Everyone gets a Quran, along with little hammocks to keep them from touching the ground when not in use. …

Detainees even convinced prison officials to no longer raise the American flag anywhere they could see it.

Gitmo is no longer a prison camp; it’s a state-sponsored madrassa. But that’s not good enough for the terrorists and their supporters.

They’re now demanding newer facilities and easier access to lawyers. And more are threatening hunger strikes and unrest if they don’t get their way.

Letting them starve themselves to extinction if they choose to would be a good way of getting rid of them, once they have told their captors everything they have to tell.

So naturally the Pentagon is considering plans for a $150 million overhaul to what is already by far the most expensive prison per capita.

Gitmo has an operating budget this year of almost $177 million. That means that taxpayers are paying more than $1 million for the care and maintenance of each of the remaining 166 terrorists.

The administration already has signed off on construction projects that include a new $11 million hospital and medical units for the detainees, and a $10 million “legal meeting complex,” where lawyers can meet their detainee clients and no doubt conjure up more sob stories to plant in the U.S. media.

Yep, that’s one nasty concentration camp we’re running down there in Cuba.

Michelle Malkin’s book Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Regnery 2009) is, we’re happy to see, top of the NYT bestseller list for the fourth week running. As the leading supplier of  the most significant facts about Obama and his administration that the mass-media try to hide, she deserves the nation’s  gratitude.

This is from one of her recent Townhall columns:

Savor the silence of America’s self-serving champions of privacy. For once, the American Civil Liberties Union has nothing bad to say about the latest case of secret domestic surveillance — because it is the ACLU that committed the spying.

Last week, The Washington Post reported on a new Justice Department inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guantanamo Bay detainees. According to the report, the pictures of covert American CIA officers — “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes” — were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators…

The ACLU’s team used lists and data from “human rights groups,” European researchers and news organizations that were involved in “(t)racking international CIA-chartered flights” and monitoring hotel phone records. Working from a witch-hunt list of 45 CIA employees, the ACLU team tailed and photographed agency employees or obtained other photos from public records.

And then they showed the images to suspected al-Qaida operatives implicated in murdering 3,000 innocent men, women and children on American soil.

Where is the concern for the safety of these American officers and their families? Where’s the outrage from all the indignant supporters of former CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose name was leaked by Bush State Department official Richard Armitage to the late Robert Novak? Lefties swung their nooses for years over the disclosure, citing federal laws prohibiting the sharing of classified information and proscribing anyone from unauthorized exposure of undercover intelligence agents.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero refused to comment on Project CIA Paparazzi and instead whined some more about the evil Bush/CIA interrogators. Left-wing commentators and distraction artists are dutifully up in arms about such “inhumane” tactics as blowing cigar smoke in the faces of Gitmo detainees. But it’s Romero blowing unconscionable smoke:

“We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken as we investigated the circumstances of the torture of our clients and as we have vigorously defended our clients’ interests,” he told the Post. “Rather than investigate the CIA officials who undertook the torture, they are now investigating the military lawyers who have courageously stepped up to defend these clients in these sham proceedings.”

Courage? What tools and fools these jihadi-enablers be. Civil liberties opportunism is literally a part of the al-Qaida handbook. A terrorist manual seized in a Manchester, England, raid in 2005 advised operatives: “At the beginning of the trial … the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security before the judge. Complain of mistreatment while in prison.” Jihadi commanders rehearsed the lines with their foot soldiers “to ensure that they have assimilated it.”

Since 9/11, the selective champions of privacy have recklessly blabbed about counter-terrorism operations, endangered the lives of military and intelligence officials at Gitmo, and undermined national security through endless litigation… Now, caught red-handed blowing the cover of CIA operatives, they shrug their shoulders and dismiss it as “normal” research on behalf of “our clients.”

But don’t you dare question their love of country. Spying to stop the next 9/11 is treason, you see. Spying to stop enhanced interrogation of Gitmo detainees is patriotic. And endangering America on behalf of international human rights is the ultimate form of leftist dissent.

From the moment John McCain was chosen to be GOP candidate for the presidency we knew the battle was lost. McCain never made the case that needed to be made for any part of Republican policies. He enthusiastically helped Obama to trash the Bush administration. Where Bush was certainly right and successful was in all that he did to prevent another 9/11 on his watch. At last someone who can speak with authority and be listened to is saying so. 

This is an extract from the speech on national security made by Dick Cheney yesterday, defending the measures taken by the last adminsitration to keep Americans safe. Here’s a link to the whole text. 

The United States of America was a good country before 9/11, just as we are today. List all the things that make us a force for good in the world — for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences — and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America. If fine speechmaking, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field.

And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along.

Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for — our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

What is equally certain is this: The broad-based strategy set in motion by President Bush obviously had nothing to do with causing the events of 9/11. But the serious way we dealt with terrorists from then on, and all the intelligence we gathered in that time, had everything to do with preventing another 9/11 on our watch. The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.

This might explain why President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate. What value remains to that authority is debatable, given that the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against, and which ones not to worry about. Yet having reserved for himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they make in the future.

Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual. Across the world, governments that have helped us capture terrorists will fear that sensitive joint operations will be compromised. And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.

As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I’ve formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned and the consequences for national security. And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected. It’s worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the president himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.

 On the signing by President Obama of an executive order to close the terrorist-holding prison at Guantanamo Bay within a year, Ben Johnson writes:

At the signing ceremony Thursday, Obama said, "The message that we are sending around the world is that the United States intends to prosecute the ongoing struggle against violence and terrorism, and we are going to do so vigilantly, we are going to do so effectively, and we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals." 

The actual message Obama sent is that the United States now places "world opinion" above its own well-being; that the commander-in-chief of the War on Terror is willing to grant the other side tactical advantages; that the leader of the free world acts on image without thinking out the practical consequences his actions might have for his country or his soldiers. The only silver lining is the president’s hypocrisy. Thursday’s signing ceremony was the triumph of style over substance, of emotional masturbation over hard-headed analysis, of the politics of guilt over the duty of self-defense. It was certainly no way to inaugurate a new era of responsibility.