A retired U.S. Army officer says the Obama administration is engaging in rampant “hypocrisy” as it trumpets the drone killing of terrorist targets while also releasing some of the worst terrorists from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Bob Maginnis is now an adviser to the Pentagon and the author of the new book “Never Submit: Will the Extermination of Christians Get Worse Before it Gets Better.” Maginnis told the Washington Times on Sunday that Obama’s schizophrenic policy on terrorists is mind-boggling.
“The hypocrisy of the Obama administration knows no limit,” said Maginnis in a comment to the Times. “On one hand, they boast about bagging al-Qaida bomb makers, and on the other, they are releasing known bomb makers from Gitmo.”
Maginnis told WND and Radio America Obama’s goal of emptying Guantanamo as quickly as possible is especially infuriating.
“We spent a lot of blood, sweat and tears and certainly a lot of money to try to incarcerate and detain known terrorists from al-Qaida or battlefields in Iraq or elsewhere in the world,” he said. “The Obama administration is dead set on letting them all go.”
Maginnis added, “The American people, I think, should be up in arms. Here we have a president who is releasing known killers.”
Within the past several months, the Obama administration has publicly announced the drone killings of suspected terrorist bomb makers, but four hard-core bomb makers have been released during that same time, often to nations that have no interest in keeping tabs on them.
“We’re letting these people go to their homelands, where in many cases they aren’t going to be detained very long and certainly aren’t going to punished like I think they well deserve,” Maginnis said.
By the Pentagon’s own calculations, roughly a third of released Guantanamo detainees are confirmed or are suspected to have returned to terrorist activities.
While the paradox of using drones to kill some terrorists while releasing others seems to be a wash, Maginnis said the confusing policy actually means America is losing ground.
“Drone killing is OK, but it compromised the necessary intelligence to break up networks,” he explained. “So instead of killing some of these folks, we ought to grab them, drain them of the information that we possibly can, and then shut down the networks rather than one here and one there and so forth.”
Maginnis said releasing detainees only to pursue them again makes no sense to him and costs a lot of money.
But he said Obama bears much responsibility, not only for this policy, but for the carnage seen in the Middle East over the past seven years.
“He’s the guy that in June of ’09 went to Cairo and preached to the world, saying the United States is a bad country because we’re not treating Muslims the way we should,” Maginnis said. “In the wake of that, we had the Arab Spring, we’ve had civil wars that have eviscerated much of that region and we’ve had a lot of terrorism that I think has come as a direct result.”