Catastrophe - Dick Morris [65]
Meanwhile, in moving to close the Guantánamo prison, President Obama has raised the specter that 250 of the most hardened terrorists in the world will be released. (For a fuller discussion of this issue, see the chapter on Guantánamo in our previous book, Fleeced.)
One early—and chilling—example of the kinds of men Obama considers fit for release is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was freed from Guantánamo in the first few weeks of the Obama presidency and sent home to the United Kingdom where he will face no charges.
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THE TERRORIST OBAMA FREED: BINYAM MOHAMED
He was arrested while accompanying Jose Padilla into the United States. Padilla and Mohamed had visited an al-Qaeda training camp, where they met with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who tasked them with making and detonating a dirty bomb in an American city.
He trained at al-Qaeda camps, where he specialized in firearms and explosives.
He was paid by al-Qaeda to travel to the United States to implement plans to blow up high-rise apartment buildings here.
He attempted to enter the United States in 2002 but was turned away because his passport was forged.
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Mohamed’s case attracted a lot of publicity when his lawyers alleged that he had been tortured in U.S. custody. Yet now, regardless of his record of crimes against the United States, Obama is letting him go!
He is practically inviting this hardened terrorist to resume his efforts to kill us.
And if Obama isn’t keeping terrorists locked up, why should anybody else? Just two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, Yemen freed 170 men whom “it had arrested on suspicion of having ties to al-Qaeda.”243 The release came right after al-Qaeda had announced that Yemen would be its ongoing base of terrorist activities throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Apparently, Yemen wanted to help out its hometown industry!
Of course, Yemen wasn’t entirely irresponsible in releasing these men. They were freed only “after signing pledges not to engage in terrorism.”244
These were the same kind of pledges Holder got the FALN terrorists to sign—the kind that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. And, as if that weren’t enough, news reports reassured us that “local tribal leaders are also expected to guarantee the good behavior of the men.”245
Wow. What a relief.
Yemen hadn’t released the men before because, during the Bush administration, it was concerned that doing so might “increase [Bush’s] reluctance to release Yemeni detainees from the Guantánamo Bay detention facility.”246 Yet under Obama it apparently felt so such trepidation.
Roughly 40 percent of the remaining detainees at Guantánamo Bay are Yemenis.
They’ll fit in nicely with their al-Qaeda colleagues in Yemen!
These stories are horrific enough, but they raise a more fundamental question: Is Obama out of his mind? Why would a president, charged with protecting us, let terrorists go? Why would he appoint the kinds of people he has to the Justice Department?
Let’s remember where Obama comes from. Before he was elected to the Illinois State Senate, his only real job was teaching constitutional law. He has to get up to speed on economics—he’s not doing too well so far—and foreign policy. But when it comes to constitutional law, he’s right in his element.
Obama believes that the Constitution applies equally to the prosecution of criminal defendants and to the gathering of intelligence. He believes you have to get your information in ways that won’t prevent it from being introduced as evidence in a criminal trial.
Who disagrees with this position? President Bush, to be sure—but also President Bill Clinton and even his attorney general Janet Reno. They all recognized that intelligence-gathering activities are not and should not be subject to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, which protect us against searches and seizures