. Read"War On Terror: Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell says closing the terrorist prison camp at Guantanamo would "make Americans less safe." He's right, but Republicans need to sharpen the point to win this key battle.
GOP opposition has put Democrats on the defensive, and the Obama administration so far is not budging from its promise to close Gitmo by the first of next year. The defense secretary says up to 100 detainees may be transferred to U.S. jails. And the attorney general wants to free and resettle at least 17 of them in the Washington suburbs..."
By Investors.com. Read more
"On Tuesday—after Democrats joined with Republicans in the Senate to vote against President Obama's request for $80 million to close the Guantanamo Bay prison—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters that he didn't want terrorist suspects in US prisons. Yet in the midst of scoring—or deflecting—a political point, Reid apparently forgot a basic fact: there are dozens of terrorists in US jails.
Senate Democrats, including Reid, moved to strip the Gitmo shutdown money after the Republicans initiated a scare campaign, warning that the worst will happen if Obama transfers Gitmo detainees to federal prison facilities in the United States. Looking for a winning political issue, Republican House members and senators have been sending letters to Obama and declaring, "Not in my state." Though Reid's home state of Nevada has no federal prisons, he joined this chorus, saying: "Part of what we don't want is [terrorists] be put in prisons in the United States. We don't want them around the United States."
By Mother Jones. Read more
"The Senate showed today that bringing Guantanamo detainees to the US is the ultimate NIMBY (not in my backyard issue).
The White House missed the warning signals on this one. As one Senate Democrat told me, it was a rare case where the Administration "drove in front of the headlights."
Can the White House turn this around? Not right now. But Senate sources from both parties say that there's still a chance the Senate will sign off on transferring some Guantanamo Bay detainees to U.S. prisons by year's end..."
By George Stephanopoulos. Watch more
”Nobody wants to have a detention center for terrorists in their backyard,” said John Yoo, the former Bush administration lawyer and an architect of the detainee policies. And Rush Limbaugh released a new edition of his Guantanamo Bay T-shirts with a new past-tense subtitle: “Club Gitmo - When America was safe.”
ByDavid M. Herszenhorn , DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK. Read more
RSS Feed