So the president tried to one-up Dick Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute, but it seems he failed to do so.
What conclusions one draws from these speeches will depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing. To my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney’s serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama’s language. Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as “violating our core values,” as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don’t see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore. I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn’t seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.
Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons. That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:
U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . .
[President Obama’s] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.
The danger here is succinctly summarized by a commenter on one of Jennifer Rubin’s posts on Contentions:
I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.
We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threat in this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons. The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who’ve been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who’ve carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al’Qaeda. It’s hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.