When it comes to national security, nothing is as good as to see the current Vice President taking on the former. Both have taken radical paths and shape our country in their reign of “power”, (they should not be having any power according to our constitution other than to break a tie in the Senate).

I am going to be unabashed and state that I am never in the same boat with VP Cheney when it comes to this. To me, he is an absolute failure when it comes to national security. Whilst, it could be President Bush that should ultimately get most of the blame, it is VP Cheney that still is backing the disastrous policies of the last administration and many would still claim that a lot of those orders would go all the way up to VP Dick Cheney.

The rot of our national Security seems to come from the fact that our Vice President never seems to know what military protocols are. He has got no idea at all and it is he that is having a “tenuous relationship with reality”.

For example, he thinks that the only way we can get intelligence out of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay is by torture, or his excuse of a term, Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. It is from this that “intelligence” was gained that led to the Iraq war where thousands of our troops died. So doesn’t that prove that that those techniques do not work?

He often claims that President Obama is taking away methods to interrogate terrorists in a ticking time bomb situation. Well, had he had served the army instead of chickening out, he would have known what the rules of Engagement are. If there is any justified perception of hostility, action can be taken. So he is wrong again on that.

Even if he thinks that perverse logic is true, why need to hold them for so many years. Why not execute them for their crimes already? Why is it that we are paying Al Qaeda personnel to be given food for so many years? Does he not know that by keeping them in for so long risks hostage situations in the future demanding their releases? (E.g. Recently, Israel released hundreds of prisoners in return for mere proof that one of their soldier is alive).

Now coming to VP Bide. Should he have said that another 9/11 would not be likely? He better do! We never want to hear that another 9/11 is inevitable! However, more important is his actions rather than his words. We had a Christmas miracle with the “underwear bomber”. That is the most that we should tolerate.

Lastly, I am very pleased that the current administration is going after Al Qaeda and is having some good results. But at the end of the day, America wants Osama bin Laden’s head. With his head, we can have the symbolic victory that the world is looking for. So until then, we are not there yet…

WASHINGTON – A grim-faced President Barack Obama declared Tuesday there was a deep failure of national intelligence in the botched Christmas Day airliner terror attack over Detroit, telling the nation the government had enough information to thwart potential disaster but could not “connect those dots.”
“The information was there,” Obama said, blistering agencies and analysts for not figuring out the threat — but without singling any out by name.
“I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect,” Obama said. Obama never said who, if anyone, in the government might be held accountable, and the White House would not say whether any officials would be fired.
The director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, said in a statement that the intelligence community had received the president’s message. The president’s own analysis is centered on identifying security gaps and filling them. Obama announced no new steps to improve the intelligence or security systems. Since the attack, the government has added dozens of names to its lists of suspected terrorists and those barred from flights bound for the United States. One of those countries, Cuba, summoned the top U.S. diplomat on the island on Tuesday to protest extra screening for Cuban citizens flying into the United States, calling the new step “this hostile action.”
“When a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day, the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way,” Obama said. Tight security — and perhaps nerves — was showing up far from the White House.
A Bakersfield, Calif., airport was temporarily shut down Tuesday after officials said a passenger’s luggage tested positive for TNT. As for Obama’s meeting with security aides, the White House released a statement later quoting him as telling them: “This was a screw-up that could have been disastrous. Obama also is suspending the transfer of Guantanamo prison detainees to Yemen. “Make no mistake, we will close Guantanamo prison,” Obama said. The camp, he said, “was an explicit rationale for the formation of al-Qaida” operating in Yemen.

“Our intelligence community failed to connect those dots which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list,” he said. “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already have.”

Obama said that it was clear the government knew that the suspect, Abdulmutallab, had traveled to Yemen and joined with extremists there.

“It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags that al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself. Before Obama’s comments, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president still has full confidence in his three top national security officials: Blair, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

They were among the 20 high-level officials who sat down with Obama in the White House Situation Room for a meeting that lasted over 90 minutes.

Abdulmutallab remains in federal custody, charged with trying to destroy the Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit. That omission prompted a review of the National Counterterrorism Center’s massive Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database.

___

Associated Press writers Darlene Superville, Joan Lowy, Philip Elliott, Matthew Lee and Faryl Ury in Washington, and Ahmed Al-Haj in San’a, Yemen, contributed to this report.

___

Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov

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WASHINGTON – Taking an important step on the thorny path to closing the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the White House plans to announce Tuesday that the government will acquire an underutilized state prison in rural Illinois to be the new home for a limited number of terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo.
Administration officials as well as Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn will make an official announcement at the White House.
Officials from both the White House and Durbin’s office confirmed that President Barack Obama had directed the government to acquire Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Ill., a sleepy town near the Mississippi River about 150 miles from Chicago. A Durbin aide said the facility would house federal inmates and no more than 100 detainees from Guantanamo Bay.
The facility in Thomson had emerged as a clear front-runner after Illinois officials, led by Durbin, enthusiastically embraced the idea of turning a near-dormant prison over to federal officials.
The Thomson Correctional Center was one of several potential sites evaluated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to potentially house detainees from the Navy-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. The Thomson Correctional Center was built by Illinois in 2001 as a state prison with the potential to house maximum security inmates. Local officials hoped it would improve the local economy, providing jobs to a hard-hit community. State budget problems, however, have kept the 1,600-cell prison from ever fully opening. Obama has faced some resistance to the idea of housing terrorism suspects in the United States, but in Thomson many have welcomed the prospect as a potential economic engine. Thomson Village President Jerry Hebeler, was asleep when the word came that Thomson had been chosen.
Some Illinois officials have not supported the idea. Kirk has lobbied other officials to contact the White House in opposition to using the facility.

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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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The House of Representatives have passed a law that would get prisoners now residing in Guantanamo Bay to be brought to the mainland and be tried by mainland courts. Now it is just the Senate left to pass this bill. Watch out for the scare tactics that are about to be launched!

I really hope that America would not be agitated by this news. I have always stated that we need to take the terrorists to our courts and try them. The terrorists should not be just locked up and be left in Guantanamo Bay. They should be paying for their crimes in our courts.

Furthermore, there are a lot of Guantanamo Bay inmates that are “innocent”. When these “innocent” people mix around with the actual terrorists like Abu Zubayda, there is a high chance that they themselves be influenced by the ideologies of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, like how many crime connections are made in prison. The chances of this would be increased, with the lack of habeas corpus and the presence of “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” also known as torture being done to some inmates.

I think that there should be an additional clause with regard to these terrorists. I think that there should be no such thing as a life sentence for them. Even in the most liberal of states, the death penalty should be applied for people that are hellbent to kill us. The reason is that there have been terrorists in other countries that would hold up our citizens as hostage in exchange for these terrorists sitting in jail if they could.

If we execute them for the crimes that they have committed in our country, there would not be such thing. I know that there would be readers that think that I am watching too many movies and that these plots are all fictional. I would like to let them know that Israel still has a soldier in captivity and she just exchanged many Palestinian prisoners for just mere news that the soldier is alive.

I would also like to retort to some claims that this is would be bad for national security. Firstly, having these people on our mainland would not harm us. Though I have never been to a supermax security prison, I think that our country is decent enough not to allow terrorists to escape it. Its track record on it is good too. Also, I think a dead terrorist is a good terrorist, so lets start killing them!

Guantanamo Bay would not stop the next 9/11, it could create the next one. It is a selling point in recruiting terror suspects. We have broken every thing that is American stands for. We are the beacon of freedom, not the ones that take away the freedom of others based on our fears. If we have evidence about somebody, lets get them and punish them. Lets not leave them in the hole.

Right now, there are lots of laws that are being stuck in the Senate. For example, House Leader Nancy Pelosi has promised that the House would pass health care reform with a public option, whereas it is as dead as a doornail in the Senate. The Senate is also stalling on the ACES (America Clean Energy and Services) bill which the house passed a long time ago. I think that the Senate should buck up on its productivity.

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