United Liberty

There is a lot of rhetoric being bantered about by political partisans from all parties over what to do about detainees at our naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Republicans are outraged that President Barack Obama would dare think about allowing any of them to come to the United States. Let’s face it, right now, the fear is the only card Republicans have against Democrats, who have felt the heat andrejected funding to close the facilities at Gitmo.

Let me tell you something, there are already terrorists imprisoned in the United States who have committed or were planning to commit acts of terrorism, including several al-Qaeda members, both before and after 9/11.

The rhetoric from the right is dishonest and it plays on the short-term memory of the electorate who may not remember what happened to Ramzi Yousef or Richard Reid or any other terrorist responsible for killing or plotting to kill Americans.

Below are the names of more than 20 terrorists currently imprisoned at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Colorado:

• Abdul Hakim Murad
• Ahmed Ajaj
• Ahmed Omar Abu Ali
• Ahmed Ressam
• Clement Rodney Hampton-El
• El Sayyid Nosair
• Eric Robert Rudolph
• Eyad Ismail
• Ibrahim Elgabrowny
• Iyman Faris
• James Ujaama
• John Walker Lindh
• Jose Padilla
• Khalfan Khamis Mohamed
• Mahmud Abouhalima
• Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali
• Mohammed Mansour Jabarah
• Mohammed Salameh
• Mohammed Odeh
• Omar Abdel-Rahman
• Ramzi Yousef
• Richard Reid
• Terry Nichols
• Ted Kaczynski
• Wadih el-Hage
• Zacarias Moussaoui

You may recognize some of the names in that list. It covers several notable acts of terrorism against the United States from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the1998 bombings of two United States embassies in Africa.

Detainees at Gitmo should either be charged or released into the custody of their home country. That’s not exactly a new idea either, more than half of the detainees previously imprisoned there have been released.

The prison at Gitmo should be probably closed, though I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. It serves as a recruit tool for al-Qaeda, much like Abu Ghraib did, and a catalyst for future attacks.