When we did an article on Guantanamo Bay a few weeks ago, many readers could not believe our claims that having people in there would lead to terrorists kidnapping demanding Gitmo prisoners’ release as part of their ransom. Well read on to see that we were right!

We got this from moxnews.com. The content owners are PBS’s affiliate KBTC in Tacoma, Washington. The news segment is of a New York Times reporter named David Rhodes, who was kidnapped by the Taliban last year and was held up for seven months. He took advantage of sleepy guards one night and slipped away into the darkness.

Here is what he said during the interview:

“ Last November in Afghanistan, a Taliban commander kidnapped myself,an Afghan journalist I was working with and our Afghan driver. I was in Afghanistan to write a book about the country, and was about to get an interview with the Taliban commander in Logar province, an hour South East of the capital Kabul. The commander who calls himself Abu Tayeb,invited us to the interview. Instead of treating guests with honor, as in Afghan tradition, he kidnapped us and demanded a release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay and up to $25000000 in ransom…”

Not so fiction is it now right? Here are other incidents where prisoners were demanded to be released as part of ransom.:

Israel release prisoners in exchange for mere knowledge that one of their soldiers is alive. – October 2009.

Robert Fowler, Canadian diplomat kidnapped with another Canadian – Al Qaeda’s prisoners were swapped in Mali and Niger for their release. – May 2009

Swat Taliban demanded Pakistan release prisoners. Pakistan did. – February 2009.

Maoist rebels in India kidnap a police officer; demanding release of all female prisoners demanding release of all their female soldiers. – October 2009

FOX News journalists Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig being kidnapped with demands for Arab prisoners to be released in US jails – August 2006

There are tons of examples that history can provide us with. There are also many stories that go unreported in our Western press agencies or simply not a matter of urgency for our press.

That is why, I feel that it is a very urgent matter to close Guantanamo Bay as soon as possible. It would be a matter of “when” and not “if” a mass kidnapping is to take place to exchange terrorists for innocent human lives; and in that scenario, people are going to die. What are we going to do then? Release the prisoners or let innocent people die?

We have got to release the “innocent” ones and hang the guilty ones, be it of any crime related to terror. Why in the blue hell is Abu Zubaydah still alive? Why hasn’t he paid for his crimes with his life? The reason the “innocent” are in quotation marks is because many of them are not so innocent after spending years in Gitmo with hard core terrorists like Abu Zubayda..

Please stop with the excuse of intelligence gathering. What do you think you can get from Abu Zubayah now that you would not have gotten a year into his prison term? At most interrogation takes months, not years! And investigation can get intelligence rather than Guantanamo Bay.

I do hope that readers get my point across in the fact that we need to either hang or release most of the detainees in Guantanamo Bay. Please never hesitate to place your thoughts in the comment box below.

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