While * was still in office a number of released Gitmo prisoners were released. A lot of (R) were against it. Most stayed silent. DU tended to regard opposition to their release in a negative light, and the Breaking News forum (more active back then than now) tended to not dwell on *'s attempts to reduce the # of detainees at Gitmo. The attitude was that Gitmo should vanish--try the detainees or release them. In many cases, if tortured the detainees should be released because there could be no trials.
Before long, though, a lot of the detainees had vanished. I vaguely remember some "investigative reporter" trying to locate a lot of them and failing to find a bunch. Some later turned up killing Americans in Iraq or, IIRC, Somalia, even though the countries involved were supposed to monitor them and keep them from engaging in such activities. Some turned up as bad guys in other countries. Most just vanished.
Sa'udi Arabia figured prominently in their vanishing, which provoked a fair number of jeers (and (R) embarrassment). So did Qatar. Oddly, so did Sweden and Albania and, if memory serves, Britain. We usually paid these countries or gave various concessions to get them to accept the Gitmo detainees. That was a big part of the news--how we bribed countries to take them. Currently we are just told that countries have taken them with no word as to what, if anything, was the payoff for the countries involved. Perhaps countries have just decided that the terrorism cards held by the currently held detainees are too stale to worry about.
When detainees vanished, the general response on DU was to mostly negative --and to blame * for creating the terrorists involved or to mock him for ... I'm not sure what, since the general view is and always has been that most should be released. (Although at the time, "tried or released" most naturally came to mind. The incessant resetting of the clock for trying them finally became so old that trying them was mostly forgotten or buried.)
For a number of (R), thinking in lock-step is as important as it is for some (D). However, in the case of recent detainees released there's the old fall-back of "Obama may have released them, but it was * that made them into terrorists." As though that actually absolves anybody from responsibility for their release if they do something wrong. The alternative possibility, that a fair number of them were picked up because they were already the sort of people that would be more than willing to engage in terrorism, is oddly absent. If they're bad, then * &Co. weren't t ultimately bad for having picking them up, which for many is reductio ad absurdum.
No, I don't have a solution. Most former have apparently vanished and a fair number have probably just been killed anonymously in various struggles in Pakistan, Afghanistan, or have found their way to fight the Shi'ite heretics in the Levant and ash-Shur, which makes for a suitable kind of denouement, as far as I'm concerned.
= new reply since forum marked as read
