Apparently, the Obama administration is considering, once again, moving the 100 or so detainees still at Gitmo to an American prison. Michelle Malkin, you may not be surprised to learn, is having a fit.
In 2009, the White House first floated the idea of using the Thomson Correctional Center, a high-security prison in Illinois, to house Gitmo denizens. Family members of 9/11 victims, God bless them, raised a national uproar. Debra Burlingame, sister of American Airlines Flight 77 pilot Chic Burlingame, blasted the feckless president’s assertion that no one would be put in danger by his Gitmo relocation program.
Citing convicted shoe bomber Richard Reid’s successful push (backed by liberal ACLU lawyers) to proselytize about Islam at the supermax facility here in Colorado, where I live, Burlingame cut through the bullcrap. “Mr. Obama has repeatedly suggested that the security challenge of bringing more than 100 trained and dangerous terrorists onto U.S. soil can be solved by simply installing them in an impenetrable fortress. This view is either disingenuous or naive,” she wrote.
What expertise has Ms. Burlingame? Malkin doesn’t say, meaning … probably none.
There is nothing one might say about contemporary jihadis that may not be said of the German and Italian troops America faced in World War II — They are ideologues! They are highly trained killers! They eat babies! They’re on a first-name basis with Satan! — and we imprisoned roughly 500,000 of them as POWs right here in the United States; they did farm labor, logging, mining — all the work that our soldiers weren’t here to do.
Many of them formed lifelong friendships with the Americans they met, and no few of them got girls in ‘trouble’ and ended-up rejecting repatriation at the end of the war, became American citizens, and lived fruitful and happy lives.
Are we really not up to doing the same job our grandparents did? I’ll grant that Malkin’s excitable readers may not be, but I’ve no doubt whatever that the rest of us are.