Gitmo Nonsense
David Warren:
To set any of the Guantanamo inmates free, on some jurisprudential technicality, is to smear one's hands with the blood of their victims when they return to their trade. This is not a hypothetical proposition: for while the numbers are disputed, a proportion of "low risk" inmates already freed from Guantanamo have returned to action. This is why families of 9/11 victims were outraged by the executive orders. It is why Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who lost 17 of his men in the attack on the USS Cole (at Aden in 2000), said of the order, "It demeans their deaths." For among the apparent beneficiaries of President Obama's "symbolic" measure is a "suspect" in the Cole attack. . . . The liberal mind -- now fully restored to power in the United States -- is in love with symbolic gestures. It is not much enamoured of the hard prudential reasoning that is involved in choosing between two or more evils. The mystery, to me, is the consistency with which it chooses to ignore the greater evil, in order to address the lesser.