There Is A New Sheriff In Town

Notes of Concern…
…Jack Blair

A New Sheriff In Town!

There is a new Sheriff in town.
The town is Washington, D.C.
The Sheriff is President Barack H. Obama.

In his first days in office he announced that he would close the Guantanamo Base Prisoner Camp known as “Gitmo.”

So the Sheriff wants us to know he is closing the jail.

Such an announcement would not normally be met with applause from the townspeople who might then have to face the criminals.

But the Sheriff is mighty popular at the moment and the townspeople are applauding.

Let us look at this situation a bit more closely. The Wikipedia encyclopedia has this to say about the prison:

Since October 7, 2001, when the current war in Afghanistan began, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantánamo. Of these, approximately 420 have been released without charge. As of May 2008, approximately 255 detainees remain. More than a fifth are cleared for release (51) but must nevertheless remain indefinitely because countries are reluctant to accept them.

Let’s do the math.

775 incarcerated.
420 released without charge under President George Bush
255 remain.

20% of the 255, that would be 51, are free to go but no country wants them. I wonder why? Do you want them roaming our streets?

But let’s subtract them for the sake of argument.

We are down to 204

So 204 persons of “high value” to our intelligence gathering efforts, in support of our troops deployed abroad, have become a celebrated cause for people who want them either moved to nicer accommodations or simply released back out into the world, where it could reasonably be argued they would again ply their trade of terror.

Americans in large numbers believe these 204 have been tortured. We see ourselves as the folks wearing the “white hats” and we join with the Sheriff in our distaste for torture.

News columnists have also told us that these people have been denied basic rights under law. They usually go on to state that this denial is symptomatic of what was wrong with Bush and Cheney. If Bush were more like Washington, or Lincoln, or Jefferson, he would never have done this.

If you care to be knowledgeable of how tough Washington was in wartime, check out any of his biographies, especially during his years fighting in western Pennsylvania. Scalping took place in those years by our Indian brethren, often under our watchful eye.

Just recently Sam Allis wrote a column in The Boston Globe where he pointed out that Abraham Lincoln in 1962 had “done away with habeas corpus by then and Stone (Brigadier General Stone) was never charged with a crime despite his attempts to learn what he was alleged to have done. Then one day, without explanation, he was simply let go.”

Maybe President Bush based some of his wartime ideas on those adopted by presidents we revere.

Americans are terribly upset that these Gitmo prisoners have been subjected to questioning techniques that are, let’s say, not great topics for family conversation. But keep in mind we are not speaking here of pulling out finger nails, or shocking private parts of their anatomy, or hanging them from the ceiling until their arms come out of the sockets, or summarily shooting them after a “Kangaroo Court.”

None of the types of torture used in previous wars have been suggested for this one. No, we designed much more horrible tortures. For instance, we play loud music so they cannot sleep. Sometimes we make them stay in rooms that are uncomfortably hot or uncomfortably cold. Once in a while we take away their clothes and make them sit naked for hours. We have even been known to walk some sexy ladies past them when they are trying to do their devotions.

Then there is the infamous water boarding. Without getting too graphic, water boarding gives one the impression that he is drowning. That said, no reports to date of anyone actually drowning.

These complaining citizens are the same Americans who are glued to their television sets weekly to watch agent Jack Bauer get the information from his group of “high value” folks on the TV show “24”. The same Americans, lets say, who cheer Clint Eastwood when he holds a big gun and says, “Make my day!” to the bad guys.

Readers, there are 212 folks down there in Cuba who are considered by our government, whoops, our former government (that would be the one that presided over eight years of no repeat attacks on us by terrorists), as folks who just might have some information that could save hundreds or thousands of American lives. Is it possible there are some who are less guilty than others? Probably.

Well, the International Herald Tribune carried this headline recently:

Guantánamo detainee resurfaces in terrorist group

The story by Robert Worth, published on January 29, 2009 is quite interesting. Here is just a short portion of it. If you want all the sordid details, check it out online.

“BEIRUT: The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order that President Barack Obama signed that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen's capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.”

We are a people with a very short memory.

War is hell.

Trying to keep us safe can be a very difficult task.

Trying to keep us safe by the rules currently recommended seems to me to be a fool’s errand.

How many of you think that when someone from the government walks into a room and asks a prisoner, a suspected terrorist, to tell us about any plans his pals have to attack the United States, he will ask for a pad and pencil so he can write down all the details and then offer to lead us to their hideout?

Those of you who raised your hands, I have a bridge I want to sell you in Brooklyn.

Let me say that if The United States of America had been hit in a significant way two or three times in the last eight years, there would indeed have been impeachment hearings in the Congress. And it would have been George Bush they were impeaching.

All of us would want to know what the president did, or did not do, to prevent these horrible events and whether what he did was sufficient. Then we would throw him out of office for failing to “defend and protect The United States.” This last part is just a little promise our Constitution asked him to make both times he placed his hand on a bible and the Chief Justice didn’t flub the Oath of Office.

So we make him promise to protect us. But we get to punish him if he is successful but we don’t like his methods.

At the same time, if he fails to protect us, we remind him of that oath and then throw him out.

Nice plan. It is a wonder anyone wants the job.

What is a president protecting us from?

I am talking about events like a suitcase nuclear device wiping out a major American city. I am talking about poison gas or biological weapons being placed in the heating vents of a very large building, like the John Hancock Center, bringing every working person to their death.

If things like that had happened, would we be as quick to worry about the niceties of interrogation in time of war?

For everyone who is really upset about the way we treat prisoners in wartime, I would recommend they take a refresher course on what we Americans did in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the First and Second World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
Sir Winston Churchill spoke out about the dangers prior to World War II. Hardly anyone in England would listen. They didn’t want to talk about it, they wouldn’t elect Prime Ministers who believed it, and they refused to even listen to Churchill who spoke largely to an empty Parliament.

Franklin Roosevelt tried to lead a nation that desperately wanted to be neutral into a war to save the world. Americans were furious with him. The war, they said, was across the ocean and none of our business. When Hitler was on the coast of Britain, having taken everything else, Americans continued to believe he would stop there.

Our own John Adams tried to get the colonists to realize where life under George III was leading. He was considered both a war monger and an “in your face” speaker

President George Bush, of whom I have not been a fan, is the first president that received the intelligence briefings after the first attack on our homeland. It was he who every morning was told of what was being planned, what might happen, and how many American lives might be lost. Each morning as he received this information Americans moved further and further away from that awful day when the towers fell and 3000 died.

Years of no repeats of that day have given us a sense of safety. We owe that to the good men and women who worked every day to see that we were kept safe.

George Bush may have many deficiencies. But in his responsibility to keep us safe I would give him an A+. And he did it while many of us were screaming “stop it”!

The leaders of our last government left us with a warning that all is not well in the world, that we are a continuing target, and that only vigilance will provide us the edge we need.

The new Sheriff is just getting familiar with the floor plans at The White House Jail. Perhaps, as he begins to be the recipient of the daily briefings about the “bad and the awful” he will see the world in a way quite different than he saw it as a U.S. Senator and as a candidate for president.

There are a few voices out there now, out in our own wilderness, telling us we need to be crafty, tough and prepared for what is coming.


Information is the currency of espionage. And espionage has been needed in every war fought at any time in the history of man.

Without information we cannot protect ourselves, or our liberties. If we insist on tying the hands of the CIA and the military, we have only ourselves to blame when the next disaster strikes.

None of us knows how many mistakes, errors in judgment, or simply unthinkable things might have been done over the years. It is also true that none of us knows how many thousands of people may have been saved by our attempts to gather information.

Today we have chosen.

We have chosen the path announced by the Sheriff.

Only time will demonstrate whether that choice was wise or foolish. I hope with all my heart that it will prove to be a wise choice. We all win if it turns out that way.

If foolish, it may well be deadly.