President Obama gave a stirring speech today about the Guantanamo Bay detention facility that may have been music to the ears of the defeatists and uninformed in this country, but didn’t bring anything new to the table. Again, he failed to provide a solid plan for transferring our nation’s enemies elsewhere in my mind.

We have been tracking many of these individuals for YEARS and finally have them squirreled away somewhere they can’t escape. Yet, the president contradicted himself when he noted that his “single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe” and then goes on to denigrate our efforts at Gitmo by saying that its mere existence “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” He said that the prison has weakened American national security.

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that. Al Qaeda and terrorists organizations don’t need Guantanamo to have a reason to want us dead. They have their own extremist ideologies that help with that. They have been trying to actively kill us since the 80s. They are only strengthened and emboldened when we have politicians who publicly release our secrets, tactics, techniques, and procedures for dealing with and fighting them.

I think that our elected officials, specifically the President, would hurt their cause MORE by hailing those troops at Gitmo that have nobly done their duties in handling detainees at the prison since 2004, when harsh treatment was more specifically forbidden. Why aren’t our politicians who claim to feel so highly about “national security” strengthening our resolve to capture and kill these zealots and publicly touting the virtues of what we HAVE done there? I could not care less if terrorists are motivated by the presence of the camp. That’s not my problem. That’s not America’s problem. I just want them dead or behind bars on a Communist island before they can kill more of my fellow Americans.

Another part of the problem is that President Obama simply doesn’t seem to understand terrorism or detainee issues. Even former USS Cole Commander, Kirk Lippold, sees flaws in our new “policy”.

“This isn’t a problem that President Obama inherited, it is a problem that he created by arbitrarily issuing uninformed Executive Orders on his first day in office that fulfilled campaign promises, the result of which created an unnecessary and dangerous timeline to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.”

Pete Hegseth, former officer, Iraq veteran and Executive Director Vets for Freedom, made similar comments.

“As America’s military tirelessly fights around the world to capture terrorists that pose a threat to United States, the President owes our troops clear cut guidelines on what will ultimately happen to the detainees they’ve captured. The continued ambiguity that President Obama has imposed on this issue serves only to hinder American efforts to bring to detain and bring to justice the most dangerous terrorists in the world.”

What the President fails to inform the public about is that not ALL detainees captured on the battlefield are sent to Gitmo. They are sent to Gitmo if the circumstances of their capture indicate that they are a more severe threat to troops on the battlefield. More often than not, detainees are kept in theater and ultimately released when they are no longer deemed a threat. The same goes for the Cuban prison.

In his comments, President Obama attempted to again cast the blame net backwards at the Bush administration. He’s a master of deflection, regardless of the topic. Many of the detainees released under the previous administration were released as a consequence of extreme pressure from Obama and his cronies in Congress. As a result, 1 in 7 former Gitmo detainees have RETURNED to terrorism and/or militant activity. These terrorists would have you believe that they weren’t this way prior to being detained. Bull puckie!

If you want to know what motivates the jihadis and extremist Muslims, I highly suggest you read “The Islamist” by Ed Hussain. It’s the story of a typical peace loving Muslim who was seduced by militant Islam, converted others, and eventually realized the perversion of the movement and left. He gives many different detailed tactics the jihadis use to gain attention and news – like publicly stating that America made them the way they are. The blame game is a much-respected tactic of Islamic extremists. And our President plays right into their hands. If captured, they use the prison system to their advantage, something that Hegseth also noted in his response to President Obama’s speech today.

We cannot afford to allow the handling of the 240 hardened detainees still in Guantanamo to become a political, partisan, or ideological battle. These are dangerous Islamic militants who my fellow warriors captured on the battlefield, and I spent a year guarding at Guantanamo Bay. Nothing short of our national security, and the success of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, is at stake.

Our troops are not the enemy and it would be nice if our President made that clear. By constantly playing the broken Gitmo record, our troops suffer. He should be educating the public (and by extension the enemy) that Gitmo is not a torture chamber and that it will be the fate of anyone plotting to destroy this country and killing Americans. It sounds real good during a politically charged campaign, but as president it’s irresponsible and contrary to the success of our mission. It’s time to stop apologizing to people that want us dead under any circumstance.

Gitmo is not “a rallying cry for our enemies.” If that were the case, where did they come from BEFORE 9/11? We have swallowed their bait hook, line, and sinker! The jihadis want us to blame ourselves and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Blaming America for terrorism around the world is what creates more terrorists, not a prison where we keep them! When the extremist Muslims see our nation’s leaders justifying their rhetoric, it strengthens their resolve and serves as a recruitment tool. “See, even the Americans admit they are slaughtering and disrespecting Muslims. Join us and fight them to the death!!”

“We’re cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess,” said Obama today. It’s not a mess. What’s a mess is our economy and the destruction of Constitutional values. There were no legal challenges to the lawful detention of enemy combatants until the liberals in the country made it such. He admitted that we’d be facing these legal challenges whether or not we closed the facility. So why do it then? What have we gained from it? Made the terrorists happy and weakened our own image of strength and unity.

Obama said some good things today, don’t get me wrong. He ensured that we are aware it is not his intent to release anyone that would be a threat to this country. He also said he would not release people into the United States who are a threat to its citizens. But, in doing so, he used flawed examples in making his case of transferring detainees to the US. He mentioned how Ramzi Yousef and Zacarias Moussaoui were model examples of our justice system. However, BOTH individuals committed (or attempted to commit) their crimes HERE in the United States. They are subject to our courts, unlike the people trying to kill our troops in violation of the laws of war. Yousef was responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing and tracked to Pakistan and extradited. Moussaoui planned other attacks against Americans here at home.

The guys at Guantanamo are illegal enemy combatants, terrorists, and/or insurgents targeting our troops. They were captured on the battlefield and sent to Gitmo to protect our troops. So the analogy is inept. If they are going to be tried, it needs to be in Geneva at the war crimes tribunal.

Here’s another problem: it’s actually ILLEGAL to try the detainees at Gitmo in the United States. No one is talking about that. Article 84 of the third Geneva Convention specifically states that prisoners of war “shall be tried only by a military court.” US courts are NOT military courts. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs tried to say today that it’s no different trying Gitmo detainees than it is the four people arrested for plotting a Jewish center in New York. Again, completely different circumstances as those crimes occurred in the United States! It’s really not rocket science, Robert. To learn more about the legalities of this issue, read what I wrote back on January 24th.

Our troops are fighting a difficult battle and the last thing we need are politicians with NO military experience calling our troops torturers. Obama was right about something – America does not torture. It’s time that he made that clear and stop trying to make a man who is no longer president look bad for the sole purpose of pumping himself up. Those Soldiers who have been found guilty of torture were properly punished (though it could have been more harsh in my eyes). If only our elected officials would make that clear to America and our enemies!