Obama brings the Gitmolympics home
Obama brings the Gitmolympics home
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009
President Obama’s hometown cronies lost their bid to bring the 2016 Olympic Games to the Windy City. But this week, they got a consolation prize: the Gitmolympics. On Tuesday, the White House went public with its official plans to purchase the Thomson Correctional Facility from financially-strapped Illinois to house Guantanamo Bay detainees. The War on Terror meets the Chicago Way.
Political boosters of the Illinois budget bailout masquerading as a national security program can’t wait to roll out the jihadi welcome mat. Unions representing federal prison workers also cheered the move. Leading the lobbying delegation for the new Gitmo-in-the-heartland located a few hours west of Chicago: Democrat Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, last seen on the international stage in 2005 likening American interrogators and military staff at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Soviet gulag operators and genocidal maniac Pol Pot.
And co-chairing the bid to bring suspected jihadis to American soil: Beleaguered Illinois Democrat Gov. Pat Quinn, who is salivating at the prospect of an estimated $1 billion injection into the local economy over four years. (Never mind that the jobs predictions from the Council of Economic Advisers use the same fuzzy math methods that gave us bogus porkulus numbers.)
Sensibly, the people of Illinois who will have to live with this raw deal aren’t waving their pom-poms. A Rasmussen poll shows that 51 percent of voters in the state oppose the transfer of suspected terrorists from the Cuban detention facility to their backyard – including 70 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of Democrats, and 57 percent of independents.
Left-wing advocates of closing Gitmo accuse these Americans of “NIMBYism” and groundless fear. But can you blame anyone who watched the Crashergate debacle at the White House or the Scare Force One debacle in New York City for choking on disbelief when Team Obama promises airtight safety, security, and competence?
Moreover, Illinois is already suffering its own severe prison overcrowding crisis – which Gov. Quinn has alleviated by secretly releasing more than 850 inmates, including violent offenders, since September, according to the Associated Press.
GOP gubernatorial candidate Dan Proft points out that “[t]he state’s 28 current prisons are 32 percent over capacity. Why not alleviate the overcrowding and bring the Thomson prison online” for existing criminals instead of importing them from abroad? Another Republican candidate Kirk Dillard blasted Gov. Quinn’s fiscal desperation: “I think Al-Qaeda needs to stay in Cuba. It shows how pathetic the state of Illinois’ finances are where we have to stand with our hat in hand and have the federal government give us money to open a penitentiary that the Democrats have let sit vacant for years.”
Obama officials stress that the prison would house Gitmo detainees separately from federal inmates, and that the two would be “managed separately” with “no opportunity to interact” between them. Which entirely misses the point that Gitmo detainees’ lawyers and translators have been primary security concerns – not just other inmates:
*Last month, jihadist-enabling lawyer Lynne Stewart was finally ordered to jail after her conviction in 2005 for aiding and abetting imprisoned blind Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman by smuggling coded messages of violence to terrorist followers abroad — in violation of an explicit pledge to abide by her client’s court-ordered isolation.
*Earlier this summer, the Justice Department launched an inquiry into photographs of undercover CIA officials and other intelligence personnel taken by ACLU-sponsored researchers assisting the defense team of Guatanamo Bay detainees. The pictures of covert American CIA officers – “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes,” according to the Washington Post – were shown to jihadi suspects tied to the 9/11 attacks in order to identify the interrogators.
*As investigative journalist Paul Sperry reported recently, a number of Arabic and Pashtu interpreters who served at Gitmo are “under active investigation for omitting valuable intelligence from their translations of detainee interrogations, among other security breaches.”
The corruptocrat Attorney General Eric Holder is, of course, in no position to raise any principles objections to the Gitmo-in-the-Heartland plans. Remember: He served as senior partner with Covington & Burling — the prestigious Washington, D.C. law firm, which represents 17 Yemenis currently held at Gitmo – and top attorneys at his Justice Department have had to recuse themselves numerous times over their conflicts of interest in Gitmo-related cases. Holder has failed to provide a full recusal list of all the Gitmo detainee cases from which current Justice Department political appointees have had to recuse themselves.
Meanwhile, Team Obama is now championing the very same indefinite detention powers for detainees deemed untriable that it condemned the Bush administration for exercising – and for which it targeted Gitmo for closure in the first place. Give the White House a gold medal for costly incoherence and reckless redundance.
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OT:
Hey Michelle … you’re famous in Omaha. What a bunch of nimrods (aka the MSM). Of course, the aides for Nelson are going to claim it’s false.
http://www.omaha.com/article/20091215/NEWS/712159842
After.. Let them come get us..
They do not plan to get you or me.
BESLAN, Dan Lee, BESLAN…. It sucks but places like that will be the target. Every community in this area, had best have a rapid response, immediate action plan.
They could always purchase some of the slums belonging to Val Jarrett for housing, right? I’m sure she’ll inflate the price so as to maximize profits.
Capitalism is evil, though.
On December 16th, 2009 at 11:59 pm, Flyoverman said:
Don’t limit yourself to a pure Beslan type of target. Think of the opportunity for Schrecklichkeit that a mall or a multi-story (Sears Tower) building offer a dedicated and trained terrorist like you have in Gitmo today. Don’t expect much of the leaders but there are still some foot-soldiers in the 215 detainees there.
You’re right about needing an action plan. I don’t know how effective an HRT or RRT would be though. Some twenty years ago did an exercise with the FBI’s HRT involving a plane hijacking scenario. They didn’t know how to deal with a ‘real’ terrorist then. I hope they’ve learned in the interim.
Lesson 1: A terrorist isn’t a criminal. Think high value schrecklichkeit versus any desire for personal gain or even survivability.
No, to call a terrorist a criminal would be a deadly under-estimation.
This government is insane for bringing them here, period.
On December 17th, 2009 at 2:10 am, Dan Lee said:
There are about 32 of them already in Illinois alone members of Al Qaeda cells that either had been recruited, trained and infiltrated prior to 9-11-01 or had managed to come in afterwards. Some are US citizens. There’s probably a couple hundred all told mostly in port-of-entry large cities. Those are probably more dangerous as they’re recruiting in the prisons even now.
Everyone here needs to see the 2008 movie “Traitor”.
I wish the movie wasn’t as prophetic as I suspect it will be, but it is.. Be sure to check it out.
Target practice for hillbilly marksmanship badges
Gitmolymipics doesn’t quite cut it. Let’s quit the snark and start calling these mf’s what they are and what they are doing, Better yet let’s start making them pay for what they are doing to us.
Funny thing is, he (Pres Obama) is discovering that the ACLU/far left will NOT be appeased by anything that he does short of committing complete political suicide and putting our country in imminent danger (more so than he has already).
The aforementioned ACLU has already issued a statement condemning this as nothing more than a relocation if GITMO (although I’ve heard the prisoners may actually have had it BETTER there than they will in Illinois).
My wife mentioned another interesting prospect for this version of Jurassic Park. What if the prison becomes a form of an American mecca, and Muslims decide to take up residence around the prison as was done in India before the Bhopal disaster. In this politically correct environment, will anyone be able to stop them from buying land, building houses and creating another Dearborn? Highly unlikely.
Essentially, the rising Muslim community will surround the prison and slowly drive out the existing residents – sort of like block busting in the 1950s and 1960s. When the prison is completely surrounded by Muslims, what is to stop the more violent Muslims from attacking the prison or the local Muslims from freeing the terrorists using some form of Sharia law .
There are no end of possibilities in Jurassic Park.
First of all, I just heard that 20 miles south of this prison there exists a nuclear power plant. Hey, we shouldn’t worry. Just like we shouldn’t worry about the muslim officers that live amongst our troops.
But let me suggest a new mecca for the islamists. The entire area of Afghanistan and Pakistan and probably a 500 mile radius/locus from those places. Let’s completely bomb the area with nuclear weapons. Then let’s make sure every other muslim goes there to pray. Then let’s bomb it again.