Guantanamo prison should remain open

By: Brennan Kohls

Last week President Obama submitted his plan to Congress for how he plans to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and relocate its inmates onto U.S. soil. Since his original presidential campaign run in 2008, Obama has promised to close the camp but has not been able to.

Guantanamo Bay, or GITMO for short, holds some of the most dangerous terrorists to ever live. Currently there are 91 detainees in the camp, all of them accused of some sort of terrorism. The center is holding one of the central masterminds behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Obama wants to put this animal in an American prison on American soil. Let that sink in.

Previously the Obama administration has cited GITMO as a terror recruiting tool though the facility was not open in the 1983 Beirut bombings that killed 241 American service members, and the facility was not open on Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda operatives killed 2,977 Americans. Terrorists do not attack us because of a detention facility. They attack us because we are American.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the utter stupidity of Obama’s claim during a hearing in February of 2015: “It is not a security decision. It is a political decision, based on a promise the president made on his campaign.”

Releasing detainees to their home countries in the Middle East is how the Obama administration has been attempting to close the facility, but, of course, as anyone with half a brain should be able to see is that these “reformed” terrorists are obviously going straight back to the front.

In July of 2012, an Al-Qaeda operative, Ibrahim Qosi was released from GITMO, and in December of 2015, it was discovered that the “reformed” terrorist is now a leader of al-Qaeda in Yemen. These terrorists cannot be released back into the world because they say they’re “reformed.”

In May of 2014, in a terrible, ill-advised trade with the Taliban, the president gave them five extremely dangerous, high level terrorists in exchange for the deserter, Bowe Bergdahl. It’s already been confirmed that three of the five have already tried to get back into the fight. It is so clearly obvious how releasing these animals does not make the world safer, but yet our president continues to advocate for it. The release of detainees is not a success, as Obama would like you to think.

Moving detainees from the detention camp to U.S. soil is currently illegal because of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act in Section 1031, which strictly prohibits “transfer, release or assist in the transfer or release to or within the United States, its territories.” The president cannot legally move detainees from the camp to prisons in the United States, even though he will most likely try to use executive action.

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp cannot be closed, and we cannot have the most dangerous people on earth in American prisons because they will radicalize American prisoners and cause huge national security problems.

It is so obvious that this is a bad idea, but yet Obama continues to roll with it based on his campaign promise of closing it.

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