More “Ooga Booga!” Scare Antics From Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao

(And I also posted here.)

Yesterday brought us this from the U.S. Senate Minority Leader about the prisoners currently housed at Guantanamo, including the following...

These men are exactly where they belong: locked up in a safe and secure prison and isolated from the American people, where they can do no harm. America has not been attacked at home since 9/11 because of the hard work of our Armed Forces, dedicated intelligence officials, the men and women at the Department of Homeland Security, and state and local law enforcement officials.

“The Anthrax Attack,” Mitch – remember???!!!

Apparently not; he continues…

But another reason we haven’t been attacked is because some men who are most likely to do so are locked up in Guantanamo. These inmates aren’t spectators. They’re the enemy. They’re the plotters, the planners, the funders, the ones who pull the trigger.

Really? Then why do we learn the following from this story published immediately after Obama’s victory last November (in which he quite rightly called for trials in this country for the detainees)…

Many of the about 250 Guantanamo detainees are cleared for release, but the Bush administration has been unable to find a country willing to take them.

Also, here is more on the Guantanamo detainees from this 2006 article in The Atlantic…

A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan claimed).

Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

McConnell continues…

One of the men who’s locked away safely at Guantanamo is Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the man who actually organized the 9/11 attacks. We captured him while he was planning follow-up attacks to 9/11, including a plot to destroy a West Coast skyscraper. If we hadn’t captured Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, he may very well have succeeded in carrying out the same kind of attack on the West Coast that he carried out on the East Coast.

Uh, no – as noted here, the FBI broke up the alleged plot McConnell talks about in 2002, but Mohammed wasn’t apprehended until 2003 (that and other “inconvenient truths” are noted by Timothy Noah of Slate).

McConnell continues…

Another inmate who still declares himself a ‘terrorist to the bone’ is Ali Abd al-Azeez Ali, who served as a key lieutenant for KSM on several plots against the United States and the United Kingdom, including the 9/11 attacks. During what he describes as the, quote, ‘Blessed 11 September operation,’ Ali transferred money to U.S.-based operatives and served as a sort of travel agent for some of the hijackers. This man is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans.

Another terrorist at Guantanamo who is responsible for the death of Americans is Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri, who masterminded the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors in 2000. When he was arrested, Nashiri was planning new terrorist attacks, including a plot to crash an airplane into a Western naval vessel and a plan targeting a U.S. housing compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

I will grant you that Ali Abd al-Aziz is a bad actor who probably deserves to be behind bars, and the same goes for Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri. However the following should be noted about the latter individual (from this story dated last February)…

WASHINGTON: A military judge in Guantanamo Bay dismissed all charges against Saudi national Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, accused of being a senior Al-Qaeda conspirator.

Al-Nashiri is accused of plotting the attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 US sailors in the Yemeni port city of Aden in 2000.

Judge Susan Crawford’s ruling brings the case into compliance with an order US President Barack Obama issued in his first week in office to suspend Guantanamo cases. The Obama administration could reinstate charges against Al-Nashiri at a later date.

The move avoided a showdown between the US military and Obama. It canceled a hearing that had been set for Monday in the Guantanamo war crimes court despite the fact Obama had ordered a freeze in proceedings there. Had the trial continued in defiance of Obama’s request, reinstatement of charges may not have been possible.

Here’s my question – how long have we held this guy for, anyway? And this Wikipedia article gives us the answer…

In November 2002, al-Nashiri was captured in the United Arab Emirates.[2] He is currently in American military custody in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp,[1] having previously been held at some secret location. On September 29, 2004, he was sentenced to death in absentia in a Yemeni court for his role in the USS Cole bombing.

The U.S. military put al-Rahim al-Nashiri in prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said March 14, 2008. He was held by the CIA for an undisclosed amount of time.[11]

So this guy has been held by either this country or the UAE since November 2002, and even as it left office, the Bush Administration still couldn’t make a case??

And now, we’re basically holding Al-Nashiri without a charge while we wait for the Obama Administration to refile the case.

Anybody else out there besides me see something wrong here? You know, maybe the fact that the charges could eventually be thrown out because of a procedural screwup?

And another thing – can we dispense with this ridiculous notion that “ZOMG, all of these people are going to hunt us down and kill us in our sleep, so of course we have to keep them out of this country??!!!”

These characters are a threat to us by means of their ability to organize others sympathetic to their cause and communicate with them (and I realize even THAT claim could be a stretch, particularly in the case of Mohammed, who was a braggart before he was captured and has been water boarded so many times by now that I can’t see how we could consider him to be anything but a babbling, incoherent idiot).

I’m more concerned about violent offenders housed at, say, Graterford, who, if they were to escape, could harm me or my family or friends, than I am about any of the people McConnell is talking about. Just monitor their contacts and house them; a cell has the same steel bars and gray walls anywhere in the world that you are unfortunate enough to find it.