Let's say your grandma recently died and left you her house. You have always wanted to live in grandma's house, so you were very excited about this. You knew that before grandma died she had a few cats. You are allergic to cats, but figure, hey, what's a few cats. But when you showed up the first day, you find that she's got 400 cats roaming around the place. There are statements from the local authorities, neighbors, and even the ASPCA has chimed in on the mess. But in grandma's will, you have to keep all of the cats or you cannot live in the house - at least, you have to let the cats live. Instead, it goes to you evil nemesis...
So you start out with a plan: try to give away as many cats as you can while cleaning up the mess the cats have made. You reach out to neighbors in the hopes of developing a good relationship with them, also hoping that they'll offer suggestions or even to take some of the cats. No luck. They're nice enough, but they don't want the cats. You can't kill the cats - the ASPCA is already all over you, anyway. And the authorities just want them gone. NOW.
So what do you do?
You can't just release them into the wild - who knows what havoc they'll wreak on the neighborhood. Besides, everyone knows whose cats they are...
You can't kill them - you don't have the heart to do that anyway.
You can't get others to take them - no one wants them.
You can't take them home to your other place - you're allergic after all, and that's just moving the problem from one place to another and not really solving it.
You could abandon the place to your nemesis, who will certainly kill them...
What do you do with a houseful of unwanted cats?
(PS - for the record, I don't have anything against cats. I think they're kind of cool. I don't own any, but harbor no ill will towards cats or cat owners.)
Obama is facing much the same dilemma.
They can't stay at Gitmo. He's already promised to close the place.
He can't move them to the States. Congress denied him the money to do that.
He can't kill them off. (GEESH!)
He can't abandon them or forget about them. They're an eyesore and a devolution of our entire moral fabric.
So what does he do?
He has drafted a set of guidelines for handling this situation. If they weren't enemies of our country yet, they certainly would be now! Regardless of their treatment, imagine you were picked up on the way to get groceries, taken to a foreign country (even for the folks that picked you up it's a foreign country!) and told you'll spend the rest of your life there with no charges and no chance to ever, ever get out. No one hears your case. No one listens to your pleas of innocence. You just get to stay where you are until you die.
Fun, huh?
This is a horrible situation. I would rather die than live like that. I would.
We should never have found ourselves in this situation. People in wartime situations should be interrogated and released in the countries where they live. You may say - well, what if they turn around and become terrorists? My response to that is - if you hold people without charges or a trial, how much better are we? Isn't that a terrorist tactic? And "what if" is not a logical argument - what if never happens... What if a huge meteor comes hurtling out of the sky and kills us all?!? What if cats ruled the world? What if my name was "what if?"?!?
We need to do the right thing with these folks. I don't know what the answer is. But it's not the status quo. And something MUST be done. The longer we hold them the blacker the mark on our constitution, our civil liberties, and our rights as free people. They are our brothers, children of a loving God, who are endowed by that God with inalienable rights. We need to allow them the free exercise of those rights.
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