HOUSE and Senate Democrats waxed hysterical about the urgency of closing down Guantanamo Bay when George W. Bush was president. Now that it’s their responsibility, the urgency has miraculously abated.
Yesterday, in an unusual sign of bipartisanship, the Senate (following the House’s lead) voted 90-6 to strip funding to close the Guantanamo Bay prison from the war supplemental legislation. It was a clear capitulation by Democrats to GOP attacks: The House GOP had introduced a bill, the “Keep Terrorists Out of America Act,” prohibiting the transfer of Gitmo detainees to a state without permission from that state’s governor and Legislature.
Democrats are saying they still want to close the prison, but they need to hear a plan from President Obama. So, today, Obama will give a speech outlining a “hefty part” of his plan for Gitmo.
But unless he is going to provide spine transplants to the Democrats, Obama is looking at an uphill battle.
What’s perhaps the most troubling about Dem behavior on the Hill is that while they screamed about closing Gitmo, they seem never to have considered where the prisoners would go.
But it’s not like they didn’t know it was an issue. At a 2005 Senate hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy grilled Bush officials on just that subject.
The backdrop to the hearing was the concern that Congress had for too long ceded control of Gitmo — which many Democrats were demanding be closed.
More than three years later, all we hear from Democrats is “not in my back yard.”
“We’re not going to bring al Qaeda to Big Sky Country — no way, not on my watch,” said Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat.
Dem Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska isn’t interested in helping: “I wouldn’t want them, and I wouldn’t take them.”
Virginia’s Mark Warner says Quantico is a no go. Alcatraz is off the table, says California’s Dianne Feinstein.
Even former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, now Obama’s secretary of health and human services, warned the Pentagon earlier this year that she didn’t want any prisoners sent to Kansas.
It was Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) who seemed to give voice to what they’re thinking: “We don’t want them around the United States.”
So where did Democrats think we were going to send them? Outer space?
That Democrats are buying into this nonsense argument that America is incapable of housing the detainees is just embarrassing.
The federal prison system safely holds or has held for extended periods a large number of convicted terrorists, including Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, Richard C. Reid, Timothy McVeigh, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) and Muhammad Salameh, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Never mind Charles Manson or all the other heinous criminals America safely houses.
Yesterday, an Obama administration official told the Associated Press that lawmakers need to think more “strategically.”
Or just think, period.
kirstenpowers@aol.com