By MAJ (RET) Montgomery J. Granger @mjgranger1
With the 22nd anniversary of the opening of the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, last Thursday, a flurry of articles have been published regurgitating tired talking points and once again calling for the closure of the facility. One such piece, titled “Sunsetting the War on Terror — Or Not: The Stubborn Legacy of America’s Response to 9/11,” came from Karen J. Greenberg (@KarenGreenberg3) at Tom Dispatch. She ends her piece with a call for “wiser heads” to prevail going forward. “Wiser heads” will not, however, prevail going forward because there are too few wiser heads that will be allowed to prevail. Besides which, the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is legal and appropriate.
Among her complaints, Greenberg lists the “indefinite detention,” of prisoners at Guantanamo, but this characterization is, at best, misleading. Even lawful combatant POWs may be held without charge or trial “until the end of hostilities,” in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and Law of War. Besides, more than 745 unlawful combatant Islamists who want to kill us have already been released from Gitmo. And it might interest Ms. Greenberg to know that many of those, including five Taliban leaders and dozens more al Qaeda operatives and lieutenants, have returned to the fight to continue wreaking havoc on innocent civilians worldwide—a project they’ve been engaged in since 1979 if we’re being honest.
That’s right, since the Iranian hostage crisis. We are still fighting and witnessing Iranian-sponsored terror. We had their forces in a pincer move by 2003, with a pacification of sorts in Afghanistan (2001-02) and an invasion and suppression of bad state actors in Iraq. But we failed to press the initiative into Iran, just as we failed to press the initiative into the Soviet Union in 1945. We are now living with the results of both of those mistakes.
Greenberg continues by claiming that Gitmo has “violated U.S. codes of due process.” In reality, Gitmo has not violated them; they simply don’t apply.
Even the U.S. Supreme Court has been unable to sort things out from a civilian legal point of view regarding due process rights for accused war criminals and unlawful combatants. To grant habeas or not to grant habeas? That is the question.
Never mind, there’s a war going on.
What kind of war?
A global war.
What kind of global war?
A global war on terror.
Oh, right, that war.
The problem is that sustaining a wartime posture for over 23 years is untenable. Experts will tell you that complacency takes over when you’re on high alert all of the time. And now, with millions of military-aged males crossing the U.S. southern border every several months (without their families), we have met the enemy, and he is now living among us.
Although the administration du jour is quick to point out that there “hasn’t been another 9/11,” there doesn’t have to be. We have failed to prevent terror attacks at home—just look at the attacks at a music festival in Las Vegas, a nightclub in Orlando, and a corporate party in San Bernardino.
What do the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act, and Congress matter when none of them are working and the American people are less safe and less free?
The Global War on Terror has become obsolete. It is obsolete in part because our political and military goals are not in sync. When we fought World War II, our political and military goals were in sync and remained so as long as it took to win the war. Then came the Marshall Plan, leading to Germany, France, and Italy being, today, among the most peaceful and prosperous nations on earth, not in spite of America, but because of us.
If our political and military goals in the War on Terror were in sync, there would have been many more enemy combatants incarcerated at Gitmo coupled with tribunals galore handing down life sentences and even executions—kind of like Nuremberg on steroids. If that had happened, you could at least say the United States was making progress. The next (and, admittedly, more difficult) step would be to get the 50 Muslim-majority countries to contribute proportionately to a Middle East Marshall Plan. If there were ever to be peace and prosperity in the Muslim world (and, by extension, the whole world), this is what would bring it about.
How do I know this would work? Because of history. The United States won World War II by defeating the enemy, not letting him go, letting him in, and then pretending to care, all the while using war powers against Americans instead of the real bad guys, who now block our streets, tunnels, and bridges, chanting “From the river to the sea!”
If we paid attention to T.E. Lawrence at all, we would realize that our enemies do not want peace. Heck, even our own people in the military-industrial complex (Black Rock, Boeing, General Dynamics, et al) don’t want peace. There’s too much money to be made in war. Enter: The Global War on Terror—a conflict that can be extended indefinitely with no serious plan for victory.
It doesn’t matter who’s in power politically if the military is never allowed to do its job, and the American people are conditioned to accept the woke victim philosophy as applied to Sharia-loving Islamists, who will never assimilate to American culture or respect U.S. laws.
For more than 20 years, America has been in a constant state of war, and it is unsustainable. In fact, it’s so bad that we are now funding someone else’s war and trying to tell another country how to run theirs! Meanwhile, our own people are more and more at risk, more threatened than at any time in our history, and all our government does is point fingers. It reminds me of the former Sunday newspaper comic strip Family Affair, when mom and dad enter the house after a short errand only to find the place a complete disaster area and all the kids can say is, “Not Me,” and “Ida Know.”
Whatever happened to checks and balances and co-equal branches of government?
I’ll tell you what.
Our three legal branches of government have capitulated to the one illegal fourth branch: The INTEL/INFO Branch, which is full of corrupt politicians, technocrats, bureaucrats, and Alphabet Soup Secret Squirrel Shadow Warrior Spooks. These individuals control the people in the other three branches (and there is some overlap) to the point at which everybody has something on everybody else, and they are all paranoid to the point that everybody is gearing up.
So, what’s left for the American people to do? Gear up.
Saving Grace at Guantanamo Bay 