Home » Obama and the release of the Gitmo prisoners in exchange for Bergdahl: coming home to roost

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Obama and the release of the Gitmo prisoners in exchange for Bergdahl: coming home to roost — 46 Comments

  1. Qatar functions as the piggy bank for Sunni terrorists, like Hamas, the way Iran functions for Shiite terrorists. It is much worse as a terror funder than the Saudis.

  2. Turns out India opened backdoor negotiations with the Taliban in Feb 2021. The US joined in March. In early July, Biden sent a special envoy to participate in negotiations with the Talibs in Moscow. One of the Talibs in Moscow was Khairullah Khairkhwa. It was at this meeting that the timetable for Allied withdrawal from Afghanistan was agreed for September.

    The Taliban ran into a problem. Afghan forces, mayors, and governors surrendered too quickly moving the government takeover plans into August. The cause of the surrenders was that soldiers were not being paid or fed, mayors and governors were not getting support and instructions from Kabul. Military commanders and government officials were taking payrolls to deposit in overseas accounts or taking it in cash before they split, and selling the supplies – food, ammo, guns – on the black market. Soldiers simply refused to follow orders from the criminal commanders. So everything happened very quickly. Even the Taliban was caught by surprise.

    Did anyone here know about the negotiations taking place since March? I didn’t. I read it today on Al-Jezeera where the reporters were wondering what was going on. Read this and “Related” for things we did not hear in America — https://tinyurl.com/ymefacdj .

    The best I can figure is the world is missing rock n roll whistling — https://youtu.be/CMy6PaZT7_g

  3. And none of the sophisticated party goers came down with the WuFlu; oopise, they did. Unexpected, unforeseeable, almost karma.

  4. “Afghan forces, mayors, and governors surrendered too quickly moving the government takeover plans into August.”

    I have seen this reported as well.

  5. I don’t take this very seriously as now Neo trying to scare every one in her room…

    This remind me with this case:

    U.S. Sent Cash to Iran as Americans Were Freed

    The $400 million payment to Iran was American diplomacy at its finest

  6. Don’t forget that Obama canned like about 200 high ranking military. You can bet they were the ones who weren’t toeing his line.

  7. Go away fool. No one here is buying what you’re selling.

    BTW, labeling you a fool is giving you the benefit of the doubt.

  8. “He wanted to release them and was determined to do so. Bergdahl was an excuse. By any rational determination, the price paid by the US was way too large. I can only assume that Obama wanted to pay it.”

    Yes…And he wanted the US to pay it multiple times with interest.
    Does anyone have any doubt how badly 0 hates the country that perhaps elected him president twice?

  9. No, I have no doubt. The Bergdahl thing was theater for Obama. It allowed him to demonstrate his contempt for the people that elected him.

  10. “Holy Crap on a Cracker” With all of the stuff I am seeing right now about the sell outs all I can remember is the Alex Carras quote in ‘Blazing Saddles’, “Mongo is just a pawn in the great game of life.” It appears that I have had no idea who or how much we have been sold out for as a nation however I am not a happy person today. I tend to see lots of unearned dollars given to politicians behind every decision that went against our nation. Look at the politicians who are living way beyond their paychecks and pensions in every party. My friends this is ‘Old Testament’ shit going on once more, again and again, avarice and greed.

    May Our Lord have Mercy on Our Souls.

  11. Contemplating my mush head friends and relations cranking up their rationalizations why they were right to support Biden.
    Laugh? Cry? Still working on it.
    Certain that facts will not influence their ratiocinations.

  12. When OUR revolution comes, Obama is gonna be right up there on the list, isn’t he?!

  13. Not to make excuses for Obama but what in hell are we doing holding five “forever detainees” at a military base in Cuba to begin with? If those guys committed offenses that merited life sentences, they try them and lock them away in a federal prison. But holding people captive forever because we’re afraid of what they MIGHT do? Keeping them in a military base in a foreign country because our own behavior was so bad there’s no known standard of justice we could convict them with?

    Again, not to let the Lightbringer off easy but let’s not fool ourselves that things weren’t going off the rails a long time before he showed up.

    Mike

  14. Mbunge
    Far as I know, the discussion about Gitmo was concerning the public–which may have included some annoyed Muslims–interest in having these clowns in the federal prison down the street, whichever street it happened to be. As in NIMBY.
    Additionally, another reason was the left’s shifting assertions. These guys were POW so they should be treated as such. But POW are held until the end of the war. So these guys aren’t POW. In which case they may not be covered by international law, see francs tireurs. Nope, can’t just shoot them because they’re POW-lite. They should be tried. Problem with that is if they’re convicted, they’re in a world of hurt which would not please the left So….tribunals are not just. Need…something else.
    Maybe being unorganized, uninformed, irregulars shooting at our guys is okay. But some of them were killing local civilians which is hard to justify. So…keep them until some sympathetic POTUS lets them go.
    Gitmo wasn’t out of sight/mind but it made being a poopyhead about it logistically more difficult.

  15. MBunge:

    I wrote a lot of posts on that at the time, but I no longer remember the legal details. But the problem was a legal one (to the best of my recollection). I recall that, if they had been tried and imprisoned in the US, they would be subject to certain rights in connection with the legal discovery process and the appeal process. This would be true even as non-US citizens, if they were tried here. It would give the enemy too much information. Later Congress passed a law forbidding the trials and detentions to be held here.

    Here’s some info:

    After Bush political appointees at the U.S. Office of Legal Counsel, Department of Justice advised the Bush administration that the camp could be considered outside U.S. legal jurisdiction, military guards took the first twenty detainees to Camp X-Ray on 11 January 2002. At the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the detention camp was established to detain extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate detainees in an optimal setting, and to prosecute detainees for war crimes. In practice, the site has long been used for enemy combatants

    The DoD at first kept secret the identity of the individuals held in Guantanamo, but after losing attempts to defy a Freedom of Information Act request from the Associated Press, the U.S. military officially acknowledged holding 779 prisoners in the camp.

    The Bush administration asserted that detainees were not entitled to any of the protections of the Geneva Conventions, while also claiming it was treating “all detainees consistently with the principles of the Geneva Convention.” Ensuing U.S. Supreme Court decisions since 2004 have determined otherwise and that U.S. courts do have jurisdiction: it ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on 29 June 2006, that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections listed under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. Following this, on 7 July 2006 the Department of Defense issued an internal memo stating that detainees would, in the future, be entitled to protection under Common Article 3.

    The left kept up a drumbeat of legal cases and claims that the inmates were being mistreated in various ways. Guantanamo became a big propaganda issue right from the start.

  16. OldTexan:

    Yes, it’s hard to assimilate all the awful information, even for those of us who had already become profoundly disillusioned. The only good I can see coming from it is if it opens enough eyes of those who were in denial. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

  17. The world laughs at us while democrats still indulging on their self aggrandising of how presidential biden’s speech last night and how big a sacrifice he had to made having to spare 10 minutes of his long awaited vacation to deliver this historical address

  18. MBunge,

    I agree that there should never have been “forever detainees”.

    They should never have been imprisoned in Guantanamo.

    The proper way to deal with them was a quick military trial and a quick military execution.

    BTW, the Geneva Conventions do NOT apply to jihadists. As they have no identifying clothing declaring themselves to be combatants.

    Using weapons lubricated with “Silver Bullet Grease” which contains pig fat. Ensuring, by their own beliefs declared by Allah in the Qur’an… that they will never see even one virgin.

    Obviously the executions would be uploaded to a public website for future jihadist’s edification. Remove the incentive and recruitment will plummet.

  19. Obama was a closet Muslim. His apology tour in the ME was a huge tell. The jihadis hate our culture. So do the progs. They’re fundamentally allies in that way.

    Obama’s deal with Iran was a total disaster. The Bergdahl deal the same. He allowed the hollowing out of our manufacturing capacity – sending jobs to China. All in all his foreign policy was a disaster fort the U.S.

    But tonight, I’m experiencing similar PTSD symptoms as from the betrayal of South Vietnam by our Democratic Congress. I’m so angered by the unthinking stupidity of Biden’s disaster in Afghanistan. Did no one mention that it makes sense to get all the non-combatants out of the country before you pull the military out? Did no one mention we should destroy the forts we built there before we leave? Did no one think that maybe we should bring our more advanced weapons home? Had none of the officers on the ground mentioned how dependent the Afghani army was on air support and how that was dependent on the maintenance of the aircraft – which was done by Western contactors who had left? I’m no military genius, but I can see huge holes in the planning.

    Lives will be unnecessarily lost. The honor and reputation of the USA has been badly damaged. We are much less safe as a nation than we were three days ago. I’m deeply angry and depressed. My country is failing to protect its citizens
    and to honor promises made to Afghanis. It’s humiliating.

    This country needs to quit worrying about trivial things like gender pronouns, phony racism, social justice, etc. and begin to shoulder the burden of protecting its citizens, promoting law and order, securing our borders, bringing jobs back to the U.S., and accepting that a meritocratic society is the only way forward.

    I hope I can sleep tonight. Last night was not a good one.

  20. The US have long time negotiate with Taliban in Doha, those talk never made public and whats al those long talk.

    So now Taliban allowed to takeover their homeland agin.

    Is this due to their strength on the ground?
    Or there under the table repetitive.

    Whats ware me the repetitive Bin Laden ?

  21. @ Geoffrey Britain

    “Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union.

    “They invaded Afghanistan… and we did not want to see them control Central Asia and we went to work… and it was President Reagan in partnership with Congress led by Democrats who said you know what it sounds like a pretty good idea… let’s deal with the ISI and the Pakistan military and let’s go recruit these mujahideen.

    “And great, let them come from Saudi Arabia and other countries, importing their Wahabi brand of Islam so that we can go beat the Soviet Union.”

    https://www.dawn.com/news/847153/us-created-taliban-and-abandoned-pakistan-sayshillary

  22. Indigo+Red,

    That Picasso painting of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza is one of my favorite works of art. Very poignant.

  23. FB,

    Congratulations, what a remarkable (and overnight!) improvement in your grammar…

    We know the history and hindsight is not a crystal ball. Regardless, how we got to 9/11 is irrelevant to the Xiden administration’s betrayal.

  24. Let no one remain foolish enough to believe that Obama ever had America’s best interests at heart; his entire raison d’etre was to destroy the American ancien regime from within. He learned this at the feet of his left-wing mother and the grandparents she dumped him on to raise as well as his putative father, the drunken Kenyan “diplomat,” not to mention his Islamic upbringing in Indonesia with the Soetero clan. All this was fertilized by his associates in Chicago, Ayers and Dorhn and “Reverend” Wright. He imbued deeply the lessons of “community organizing” as preached by, among others, Alinsky. He climbed the ladder of political success by lying about everything he held dear, and because the mush-headed, virtue signalling white voters, after years of propagandizing by left-wing ideologues in the press and popular media, bought his lies and voted him into every office he sought, right up to and including the presidency. Even after his ulterior motives were broadly displayed, moronic, brain-washed white voters returned him to office for a second term. During that time, his goals expanded from merely destroying the nation as it had been previously composed to include provisioning for his future economic well-being. He arrived in Washington, DC relatively penniless (except for the finances supplied by his husband Michelle’s make-work, affirmative action job in the Chicago hospital system and such graft as he was able to collect from his fellow grifters in the corrupt Chicago political scene–see, e.g., Tony Rezko), but shortly after leaving office found multi-million dollar ventures awaiting him, including ghost-written, multiple edition “autobiographies,” deals with media companies (see, e.g., Netflix) and the wherewithal to purchase an $8,000.000.00 home in Kalorama and a $12,000,000.00 beach-front home in Martha’s Vineyard. How it is possible for anyone with any functioning intellect to believe he was/is anything other than a self-aggrandizing, anti-American, anti-Christian con man and globalist exceeds my capacity to comprehend.

  25. “How it is possible for anyone with any functioning intellect to believe he was/is anything other than a self-aggrandizing, anti-American, anti-Christian con man and globalist exceeds my capacity to comprehend.”

    Yep.
    Out of a misplaced sense of guilt “we” elected a half-white, half-African Muslim to be President.
    Shockingly … it didn’t work out.

  26. Well, looks like it’s time to start biting finger nails again.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9904031/Afghanistan-evacuation-Chaos-Kabul-airport-women-beg-troops-help.html
    Kabul evacuation flights take off EMPTY as Taliban close off airport and make it impossible for Western ex-pats to get through – while fighters REFUSE to let Afghans through meaning hundreds are being left behind every day
    Evacuation flights are leaving Kabul near-empty after Taliban fighters encircled the airport in a ring of steel
    Military jets able to carry hundreds of people are instead ferrying dozens – in one shocking case a German plane with space for 150 people departed the Afghan capital with just seven on board
    Afghans say the Taliban are blocking anyone who doesn’t have a foreign passport getting to the airport, while foreigners say they have been caught up in the crush and are unable to get through
    Western nations vowed to take more than 100,000 Afghan refugees – pledge that appears increasingly hollow

  27. British paras are leaving the airport to escort some refugees to the evacuation flights. This has caused shouting matches with US troops who accuse the Brits of sabotaging their “deal” with the Taliban. Could anything be more nauseating than this behavior by US troops ? What is going on ? Who is ordering this ? Austin ?

  28. “Let’s remember here… the people we are fighting today we funded them twenty years ago… and we did it because we were locked in a struggle with the Soviet Union.

    The people we financed were later known as ‘the Northern Alliance’. The Taliban did not exist during the period the United States was financing the Afghan insurgency.

  29. I still can’t get over that we twice elected a POTUS who hates our country and it’s people so much.

  30. Out of a misplaced sense of guilt “we” elected a half-white, half-African Muslim to be President.

    Obama is not a Muslim and his acquaintance with his father or anything African has been minimal. His signature is a spiteful and secretive disposition. His attitudes are perfectly unremarkable among the sort of bourgeois professional / academic / NGO apparatchik nexus in which he has lived his life. That’s our problem – TWANLOC. He does differ in a couple of respects. Most academics don’t give a rip about celebrities and most academics are satisficers as far as their material possessions go. They cannot be bought once they have a certain portfolio of pleasant things, because more stuff doesn’t add to their utility or enhance their amour propre. It was reported in 2008 that Lawrence Summers had a 12 year old car; I’m gonna bet the sticker price on his house is 1 / 10th that on Obama’s house.

  31. G Brit.

    Agree 100%. Nearly all those people detained at Gitmo should have been executed long ago. That’s what we did to the Nazis.

    And now KSM and the others are all going to go free.

  32. “Out of a misplaced sense of guilt “we” elected a half-white, half-African Muslim to be President.”

    All that is not what did the damage or is predictive, it’s the ideology that BHO brought into the Executive that did the damage, but instead focus on the external characteristics. Otay.

  33. “Obama is not a Muslim”. Um no. If it’s still on YouTube, there is a video of Senator Obama beginning to talk about his Muslim religion. Georgi Boy Stephanopolis quickly corrects him, “ Don’t you mean your Christian religion?” Do you know anyone who would accidentally refer to his Muslim religion?

  34. Paul in Boston:

    No. That’s a misinterpretation of what Obama said. But there’s enough wrong with Obama without that.

    Here’s what actually happened and what Obama said. Now, Snopes certainly isn’t always on the up and up, but in this case I agree with what the site says. Many years ago I did my own research on it (at the moment I can’t find where I wrote about it) and came to the same conclusion.

    And here’s a 2010 post where I talk about Obama’s religion more generally.

  35. Art Deco @ 3:21pm,

    “… his acquaintance with his father or anything African has been minimal. “

    He wrote a 403 page book, “Dreams of my Father” which deals with his travels to Africa in search of his father, his ancestors and his legacy!

  36. “The people we financed were later known as ‘the Northern Alliance’. The Taliban did not exist during the period the United States was financing the Afghan insurgency.”

    “The “Northern Alliance” has now supposedly become the Panjshir resistance though the link to Wiki may be removed as they state at the top of the page.”

    https://youtu.be/WboggjN_G-4

  37. Art Deco on August 18, 2021 at 3:11 pm said:

    The Taliban did not exist during the period the United States was financing the Afghan insurgency.

    AD, Thank you for your sentence
    OBL was with the Taliban, during the Russian invasion, I don’t know where you live and I don’t know if you heard at that time or if you know there was a huge campaign lead by Saudi clerics and in other Muslim countries to give support, donations even call for Jihad in Afghanistan to fight the invader (Russia).
    Most Friday prayers called for support for Afghanistan Mujahedeen and donations for them, this might be led by OBL’s Clerics /Followers at the time, at the same time US was behind OBL/Afghan Mujahedeen supporting them with weapons and other support in that battle there.

    I tell you this, I was in the region, heard those Friday prayer calls went to another Jordan heard same calls went to a western country that calls repeated in those mosques on western land!!

    It was huge campaigning at the time.

    Then Russian defeated all things turned up down and we got AL Qaeda ……

    So how much truth in that call whether before or after I think that not the key point here the seeds were thrown there and those seeds grown and harvested again, today we seen a lot of those bad guys with sick minds who thinks Jihad is their mission in the world to cover their criminality toward other race and human.

    Simply it’s not Islam and Western world nor clash of civilisation, only wiled criminals have sick minds the world join together to fight them as on-hand one heart.

  38. Taliban name
    In Afghanistan, the source of the name is coming from Talib (Student) who study Quran/Religion those who will be ending like Clerics or Religousmen.
    So Taliban nickname those “Talib’s” who lead the Mujahideen against Russian invasion.

    The Pashtun were the backbone of Afghan insurgency at the time got support from Saudi and other gulf countries due to Madrasah that expanded during the 60s-70s in that area

  39. Three generations ago a great deal was known about Muslim extremism in India, and with good cause–indeed, one of my great-grandfathers was standing beside the viceroy when he was knifed to death by an alleged Wahhabi assassin in 1871. But by my grandfathers’ time that experience was fast being forgotten, and by my father’s generation it had been buried in the archives. Had this present generation been more aware of the true history of Indian Wahhabism, our governments might perhaps have been more wary of engaging in war by proxy following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. And if we are ever to come to terms with why so many young men have given and continue to give their lives to jihad in what the British knew as the North-West Frontier, and why so many cling to the belief that this same region is a dar-ul-Islam or “domain of the faith” second only to Mecca and Medina, then we have to understand what Wahhabism accomplished there, not only in the 1980s and 1990s but a full century and a half earlier.

    I must admit that until very recently I shared this general ignorance. I can remember traveling from Swat to Hazara in the late 1990s and being absolutely baffled when a local khan told me to be sure, as I crossed the Indus at the Tarbela Dam, to look out for the site of what he called the Hindustani Camp, “which you British called the Fanatic Camp.”

    The hidden roots of Wahhabism in British India

  40. The brutal assasination of Commissioner Frederick Mackeson on British India’s North-West Frontier in 1853 was a bloody and public declaration of a conflict that was to stretch well into the next one hundred and fifty years. The Wahhabi tribe, extreme Islamist fundamentalists, set out to restore purity to their faith by declaring violent jihad on all who opposed them. Their history has long been forgotten and yet their vicious brand of political ideology lives on. The Wahhabi deeply influenced not only the formation of modern Saudi Arabia, but Osama bin Laden and the Taliban. Their teachings educate orphan boys in Afghanistan and press rifles into their hands, for the sake of jihad.

    The parallels between this pivotal terrorist network and our post-9/11 political climate are staggering. Charles Allen sheds lights on the historical roots of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous nineteenth-century theology lives on today.

    God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad

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