Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. He is the author or co-author of 14 books.
Isn’t that the whole point? Gitmo was always just a symbol. I mean, it sure wasn’t set up to re-habilitate terrorists. It was simply that dark hole in the ground into which we tossed people who hated us, while we ignored all of the values that we’ve used to keep us astride our high ‘moral’ horse for the last few generations. The symbolic nature of Gitmo not only did nothing to curb terrorism, it actually served as a rallying point in the recruitment of new terrorists. In the meantime, it knocked us right off the high horse, from which we had routinely stared down at the abuses of less enlightened governments. Gitmo has been a boil on the nose of the United States for the last five years. It’s time it was lanced. So what if a few who were released under the Bush administration went back to their old ways. Those mistakes occurred under George Bush’s watch and they only prove that Gitmo didn’t work quite as well as he and Cheney thought. Criticisms of Obama’s closure of Gitmo are premature at best, and ignorant at worst.
Isn’t that the whole point? Gitmo was always just a symbol. I mean, it sure wasn’t set up to re-habilitate terrorists. It was simply that dark hole in the ground into which we tossed people who hated us, while we ignored all of the values that we’ve used to keep us astride our high ‘moral’ horse for the last few generations. The symbolic nature of Gitmo not only did nothing to curb terrorism, it actually served as a rallying point in the recruitment of new terrorists. In the meantime, it knocked us right off the high horse, from which we had routinely stared down at the abuses of less enlightened governments. Gitmo has been a boil on the nose of the United States for the last five years. It’s time it was lanced. So what if a few who were released under the Bush administration went back to their old ways. Those mistakes occurred under George Bush’s watch and they only prove that Gitmo didn’t work quite as well as he and Cheney thought. Criticisms of Obama’s closure of Gitmo are premature at best, and ignorant at worst.