Free Republic

Newly-minted US Senator Tom Cotton -- a combat veteran and Harvard Law alum -- dismantled the Obama administration's talking points on closing the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility during an Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday. He posed a series of question to the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense, the answers to which were strategically obvious: Tom Cotton: Guantanamo Bay Prisoners 'Can Rot in Hell' In furtherance of the president's unpopular, unauthorized obsession with shuttering the prison, the White House argues that transferring and releasing GITMO occupants not only doesn't threaten American national security, it actually enhances it. Because they, argue, the center is...

President Barack Obama swore as far back as 2008 he’d close the U.S.-run prison for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay. Five and a half years later, he finally took a real risk to get that process moving. The president defied Congress over the weekend, ignoring a 30-day notice rule required by law to greenlight the transfer to Qatar of five alleged members of the Taliban held at Guantánamo in exchange for the release of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. It’s Obama’s most assertive move to shrink Guantánamo’s population since U.S. embassy bombings suspect Ahmed Ghailani was flown from the...

The first song that played over the loudspeakers after Obama's first speech as president-elect in Chicago's Grant Park was Springsteen's 'The Rising.' No other singer backed Barack Obama more, and no other singer made clear his apathy for the Bush regime. Springsteen's outright opposition.........

They’re just as bad as we are, only worse. The prison at Guantanamo Bay was designed to interrogate terrorists and jihadists swept up from the battlefield: the idea was to keep them as prisoners of war in a war that was undeclared, and as enemy combatants without uniforms or officers. It had a no-win mandate, and will probably close soon due to international outcries about its supposed barbarity. Yet, for all the fury about its existence, not a single detainee has died there in over four years of operation. In contrast, the European Milosevic just dropped dead while under custody...

The Taliban’s former spokesman, Rahmatullah Hashemi, is now an undergraduate at Yale University, The New York Times reveals in a lengthy cover story by Chip Brown in its Sunday magazine this weekend. The cover line reads, “He was the Taliban’s spin doctor. So what’s he doing at Yale?" In fact, the story shows, Hashemi was at Yale once before—in 2001, appearing at a forum representing the Taliban, a few months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A small clip of Hashemi appears in Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” film. “In some ways,” Hashemi, 27, says today, “I’m the luckiest person in the...

(Here is the relevant passage. Other than Speaker Hastert, the Illinois Congressional delegation has been pretty quiet. Except for Evanston's Jan Schakowsky, a human-hangover from the 1960s.) REP. JAN SCHAKOWSKY (D-9): "The Bush Administration and Republican leaders are engaged in a pathetic attempt to make Senator Dick Durbin's condemnation of the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay an issue. As a result of the revelations of conditions at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram prison in Afghanistan, the Republicans owe the American people, our soldiers and veterans an apology for undermining American values such as the Rule of Law, putting our...