Do You Feel Safer With Detainees In or Out of Gitmo?

Barack Hussein Obama's administration has released six more detainees from the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. That begs the question: Do you feel safter with detainees in or out of Gitmo?

It's a question every American needs to ask themselves.

If your answer is “out,” remember that over 640 detainees have been released so far, with about a 30 percent recidivism rate. It’s the other 70 percent you should be concerned about.

If your answer is “in,” then you need to contact your Congressional representatives immediately and let them know how you feel.

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It appears Congress is powerless to stop the release of unlawful combatants from the facility and for all you know these guys will end up back in the fight, or maybe even in YOUR neighborhood.

The idea that Gitmo is a recruitment tool, or detainees are “goat herders,” or other myths are old, tired and never proven.

You could probably hold these guys in Hawaii and they would have something to complain about.

That is their training, you know?

That’s right. Before we even admitted we were in a War on Terror the British captured an Al Qaeda training manual which drives detainee behavior at Gitmo.

Police in Manchester, England, discovered the manual, which has come to be known as the "Manchester document," in 2000 while searching computer files found in the home of a known Al Qaeda member. The contents were introduced as evidence into the 2001 trial of terrorists who bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. The FBI translated the document into English.

Among the chapters were lessons 17 and 18 on how a “brother” should behave if captured and then put on trial. [Note that they EXPECT to be put on trial and not executed by Western powers.]

• "Be careful not to give the enemy any vital information [during interrogations].”
• “At the beginning of the trial ... the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them.”
• “Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.”
• “The brother has to do his best to know the names of the state security officers, who participated in his torture and mention their names to the judge. [These names may be obtained from brothers who had to deal with those officers in previous cases.]”
• “It is possible to resort to a hunger strike, but it is a tactic that can either succeed or fail.”
• “Take advantage of visits to communicate with brothers outside prison and exchange information that may be helpful to them in their work outside prison.”
• “When the brothers are transported from and to the prison [on their way to the court] they should shout Islamic slogans out loud from inside the prison cars to impress upon the people and their family the need to support Islam.”
• “The brothers should create an Islamic program for themselves inside the prison….”
• “[For God’s sake, this mujahid (fighter) will obey, in order] to establish a caliphate along the lines of the prophet.”
• “There will be a Caliphate according to the prophet’s path [instruction], if God so wills it.”
• “Upholding religion . . . will necessarily require an all out confrontation against all our enemies, who want to recreate darkness.”
• “It is imperative to stand against darkness in all arenas: the media, education, [religious] guidance, and counseling, as well as others.”

And we've known this for 15 years. All of it and more. Yet the mainstream media refuses to reveal it, comment on it or present it in opposition to the actions of the administration of Barack Hussein Obama.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld expressed frustration over this effort during a June 21, 2005 interview on the "Tony Snow Show."

"These detainees are trained to lie, they're trained to say they were tortured, and the minute we release them or the minute they get a lawyer, very frequently they'll go out and they will announce that they've been tortured," Rumsfeld said.

This image reviewed by the US military shows a member of the military asking for entrance at the front gate of 'Camp Five' and 'Camp Six' detention facility of the Joint Detention Group at the US Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, January 19, 2012. Photo Credit: JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

The media jumps on these claims, reporting them as "another example of torture," the secretary said, "when in fact, (terrorists have) been trained to do that, and their training manual says so."

Instead of being a gulag, Gitmo is the finest military detention facility on earth. Not one detainee has ever been executed, beheaded, hacked to death, blown up, dragged naked and lifeless through the streets or BURNED ALIVE. All things our enemies have done to us and/or our allies. In fact, the Islamist equivalent to Gitmo is a PILE of HEADS and ASHES.

International Committee of the Red Cross physicians I worked with at Gitmo in 2002 told me “no one does [detention operations] better than the United States.” In 2005, another ICRC physician I escorted at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq (after and in spite of the abuse scandal there) told me the same thing.

This administration has turned Gitmo into a joke in the eyes of our enemies. It is nothing more than an Islamist rest and recreation center where detainees receive world class health care, can share stories and names and tactics, and then get released.

The value of keeping your enemy detained is to keep them off the battlefield and obtain valuable information which could save many lives. This was effective under George W. Bush.

According to the Geneva Conventions and Law of Land Warfare, even lawful combatant POWs may be held without charge, “until the end of hostilities.”

This fact too has lost its way to the general public.

Gitmo is legal, ethical, moral and NECESSARY in the Global War on Terror.

Our problem is that our president unilaterally declared the War on Terror OVER in 2013. And he is behaving as if all Gitmo detainees are VICTIMS.

The Geneva Conventions and Law of War were written to protect INNOCENT civilians, not to protect those who PRETEND to be civilians in order to murder them.

Releasing Gitmo detainees will not help win the War on Terror.

Many groups other than the White House who want Gitmo closed also want us dead.

Unless we all band together and then shout to Congress with one voice we may be facing a completely replenished and inspired enemy after the President has his way with Gitmo.

As Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ariz) said, we should be filling Gitmo up, not emptying it.

Montgomery Granger is a three-times mobilized U.S. Army major (Ret.) and author of "Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay: A Memoir of a Citizen Warrior." Amazon, Blog, Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter: @mjgranger1

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