On Friday’s “On the Record” on the Fox News Channel, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer explained why President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to use the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been to the detriment of the U.S. military efforts against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
“Look. He is determined to get things done,” Krauthammer said. “He is determined to go around Congress. If he has to the way he did with immigration, the way he has done lot of other things. But I think when we look at this policy, the folly of it, we only concentrate on one half and that is the rate at which some of these people come back and fight against us. We know it’s about a third, which is a huge number. And here we are on the one hand trying to prevent, you know, the Minnesota teenagers from getting on a plane to go join ISIS. And we’re sending back people that we know, a third of which hardened leaders are going to go back and help to kill Americans, if they can.”
“But the other half of this is unremarked upon, is the fact that in the six years have not sent a single person to Guantanamo,” he continued. “We not only have subtracted the number of prisoners, we haven’t added any. And why is that important? We have nowhere to send people to interrogate them. One of the reasons we are so weak and unable to act over the skies of Iraq and Syria is we have the worst intelligence. And one of the reasons we do is we no longer are able to capture, keep, interrogate inmates which was the point of Guantanamo in the first place.”
“So, we either kill these people with a drone, or we take them to a court in New York where they require a lawyer and their Miranda rights and we can’t speak with them,” Krauthammer added. “That, I think, is what is overlooked. This is truly hurting us in the long run. Six years without a single prisoner that we can interrogate indefinitely. And as you know, in many of these cases, it takes months to get the information you want.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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