I saw something this weekend regarding Gitmo that I wish I had seen before my last post. I was watching the news and they reported that of the current detainees that have been released from Guantanamo to date approximately 12% have since rejoined terrorist groups. Now I don’t know how they come to this number, and I believe they cited the State Department as the source. But I wanted to look at what that stat means.
I guess there are two points of view. One being that by releasing captives from Gitmo we have, indeed, given Al Qaeda new soldiers in their fight against America. A scary thought for sure. And an all together correct thought. One that cannot really be argued against.
However, I am of the second point of view. This, to me, means that it is all together possible that 88% of people released never had any terrorist ties in the first place. And even if they did, the experience at Gitmo has discouraged any future involvement. I was actually surprised to hear that only 12% had rejoined. That number seems shockingly low to me. It also seems to fuel the fire all the more that this place is wrong. We have no idea under what circumstances these people were rounded up and put away. Was it incarcerate first ask questions later? I don’t know, but in the years to come as the details emerge, I have a feeling we all are going to have to live with hands sullied by the dirt of this place.
On a somewhat seperate issue I just want to acknowledge how nice it must be to be George Bush. You get to start a war, under false pretenses, and then leave it for the next guy. You get to trash an economy, somewhat due to your tax cuts while increasing government spending, and leave it for the next guy. You get to open up a poor man’s concentration camp, and leave it for the next guy. At what point do people start connecting the dots and seeing a pattern to all this. Bush never had any real plan to fix or finish any of these things. Now Obama is left to deal with them. And how can he possibly succeed against such great odds? Even if he fixes half the things wrong in the next four years, there will be a people out there waiting to trash him on things he failed upon. My advice to those people? Just remember your President had eight years to fuck this place up. And just like with a flooded house, or a natural disaster, it always takes longer to clean the place up than to destroy it.
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