The FBI and Guantanamo

It’s not fair to mention campaign promises once the election is over. This legendary impudence once uttered by a well-known German political party chief seems to have been adopted by the Democratic Party in the U.S. When asked at one time about closing Guantanamo, Barack Obama answered, “Yes, we can!” Democrats in Congress have now turned that into “Yes, we could, but not right now and don’t count on us.”

The subject is the 241 remaining “terrorist prisoners” still incarcerated at Guantanamo of whom the Justice Department has said they don’t have sufficient evidence to put them on trial, or in cases where evidence exists, it must remain classified. It was convenient that something else happened on the same day that didn’t have to be kept classified: the arrest of “an extremely violent terrorist group.”

The FBI had kept a close eye on them for nearly a year, infiltrated their ranks, and provided them with harmless rubbish the group thought were weapons. At the same time, they also demonstrated how beneficial it could be to keep the 241 prisoners behind bars: who knows what else might turn up? Now Obama has defiantly assured us he’ll soon get back to his Guantanamo closure plans. For Americans, that presumably means they’ll soon start hearing about the latest newly discovered terrorist attacks from which they’ve once again been saved.