Obama not persuasive on Gitmo closing

Houston Chronicle:
President Obama’s speech on counterterrorism strategy drew negative reviews from two key Texas lawmakers.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn challenged Obama’s assertion that America must close the prisoner facility at Guantanamo Bay, insisting it remains crucial to U.S. national security.

“Gitmo serves as an important function of detaining America’s most dangerous enemy combatants,” Cornyn said in a statement. “No individual who continues to pose a threat to the U.S. should be shuttled home at the expense of American taxpayers only to return to the battlefield to kill Americans and our friends, no matter how many dramatic hunger strikes are staged.”

Obama called on Congress to close the prison, which he promised in 2008 that he would close during his first year in office. Now well into his sixth year, Obama blamed the facility’s continued existence on Congress and said “there is no justification beyond politics for Congress to prevent us from closing a facility that should never have been opened.”

Austin Rep. Mike McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, said Obama can’t ignore the fact that al Qaeda continues to pose as a threat to America and that closing Guantanamo would increase that threat.

“The Obama administration’s return to a pre-9/11 counterterrorism mindset puts American lives at risk,” he said. “This war will continue whether the president acknowledges it or not.”

Cornyn called the president’s speech an attempt to “pivot from scandals” and said American safety should be the president’s “foremost consideration.”

...
Cornyn and McCaul have it right.  Obama is trying to return to the failed lawfare policies of the Clinton administration which led directly to the attacks of 9-11.  He is showing an ignorance of the enemy and a=of warfare in general.

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