Gitmo & Murphy's Law

Is this Newsweek essay deliberately incoherent? Are they writing out paragraphs and then running them through a rough shredder so you have to piece together the bits yourself?

Or maybe we’ve been reading bloggers for so long that the MSM just appears to be chopped up.

Boiled down to its essence this story says that the chances of a Gitmo closing have become slim to none. The reasons have a whole lot to do with shifting political winds, and those winds were shifted by the actions of some minor players, people like the Underwear Bomber. This administration, despite watching the Bush administration so carefully, has failed to understand that any bit-player can stroll on stage and boom! - your illusion that you were in control of events is blown to smithereens. With luck, you yourself will survive the blast.

The Newsweek essay has the details right, but the authors seem to have thrown the facts at the wall and then randomly gathered whatever stuck.

Here’s a quick run down:

• Obama finally gets it: sending Gitmo terrorists back to Yemen means sending them to Jihad graduate school on a scholarship paid by AQAP (al-Qaeda Arabian Peninsula). Those boys will work on their post-doctoral fellowships at AQAP and take assignments from there. Maybe they’ll come here to blow stuff up, or perhaps they’ll head to Afghanistan to train others to blow stuff up. Or both. More likely both.
  
  
• Obama’s home state pork plans for the prison at Thomsonville Illinois are looking grim. The place has already been dubbed “Gitmo North” and the name will stick like glue. You know, “you can take the terrorist out of Gitmo, but you can’t take Gitmo out…etc.”
  
  
• Thus, “closing Gitmo” is another FAIL. That’s not Obama’s “fault” unless you count being naïve as a fault. Obama was indeed naïve, to put it kindly. But the Left won’t be kind. It’s a major broken promise for which they will eat his lunch, and maybe consume his fine self while they’re at it. The progressives voted for Obama so that he’d eradicate the stain of Gitmo from the long list of American sins.
  
  
• But reality has dealt Leader and Followers a body blow: Gitmo is simply the term for wherever you incarcerate large groups of captured Islamicist terrorists. Put them in a sub-sub-basement in the White House and you’ll have “Gitmo D.C.” Put them on a submarine and take them out for a long cruise and you’ve created “Gitmo Neptune”.
  
• Everybody gotta be somewhere and captured terrorists don’t have a “get out of jail free” card. Or at least most of them don’t, not yet. Obama managed to slough off a few of the minor players to Ireland, Bermuda, etc. Ain’t nobody ever gonna take the real dangerous dudes anyway - except maybe Yemen, but that’s a piece of politically blackened toast by now.
  
• On the other hand, moving them onto to American soil could mean that some transnational activist member of our judiciary will release dangerous terrorists right into the U.S. population. Obama’s career plans could come to a grinding halt when one of them goes postal…or in this case, when one of them goes incendiarily Jihadist. Notice the use of “when” because this wasi never a matter of “if”. Jihad forever, dude.
  
• No one in this administration seems to have allowed for Murphy.

The sour turn of events in Yemen is Murphy. The Gitmo prisoners’ growing refusal to be moved to Thomson’s prison is Murphy, and they have lawyers aplenty to make Murphy stand front and center to prevent their move from tropical Cuba to the cold American Midwest, where their luxury would come to a halt. The very lawyers that Obama & Co. claimed the prisoners were entitled to have may prevent him from carrying out the executive order he signed with such a flourish (though not much comprehension) during those first heady days of his reign.
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Do read that Newsweek essay, where some of those interviewed say Obama has “blown it” because of delays. That’s ludicrous. To whom could they have sent these creeps? Europe said no, various American governors said “not in our backyard”. What, precisely, were his choices? I suppose he could’ve split them up into various groups to be sent to already existing Federal prisons, but those folks are digging in their heels, too. Federal prisons are in particular states and those states don’t want Gitmo attached to their names. Nor can they afford the expense of keeping the Lone Ranger terrorists at bay.

By the way, Obama neglected to get Congressional permission to move the terrorists to Illinois. Another flub:

In order to move the Yemenis and other Gitmo detainees to Thomson, the administration needs to persuade the Congress to lift the rider-in an election year, no less-a much more difficult task when the proposal is to move more than 100 detainees to the U.S. rather than 20 or 30.

Already, moderate GOP Rep. Mark Kirk, the likely Republican nominee in next year’s Illinois Senate race, has taken an increasingly hard line on the transfers, saying they would make Illinois “ground zero for jihadist terrorist plots.”

Those should have been the lead paragraphs in this muddled account. With Congress, a president can’t get away with the old “it’s easier to apologize than ask permission”. He’s dealing with outsize egos up there on Capitol Hill. They out-thin-skin Obama when it comes to being offended if their prerogatives are bruised.

It appears less and less likely that Gitmo is going anywhere, but maybe Obama is beginning to see how steep his learning curve in the executive office really is. Giving himself a B+ grade for his first year was simply grade inflation. Any politician that doesn't figure Murphy into his plans is an automatic F.

For FAIL...