Geek Soap Box

I usually read Hope n’ Change mostly to chuckle at its pithy, on-point cartoon critiques of the follies plaguing the current presidential administration. Today’s content, though, chills my bones and makes me ponder terrible thoughts.

And though the media keeps saying that the (ahem) former terrorists will be in Palau’s “custody,” the men will NOT be going to prison. No, the President of Palau says that (after a brief stay in a halfway house) they will be enjoying “a place of refuge and freedom.” In other words, an all-expense paid permanent vacation…for training with Al Qaeda. THAT should put fear into future terrorists!

This situation feels absurdly farscical. The United States will pay approximately $12 million per detainee for a very small foreign nation to take and house a handful of likely unrepentant terrorists — and not even jail them, but attempt to reform them.

Maybe it’s just me, but I am highly skeptical that this “rehabilitation” will prove successful, and even if it did, we still managed to reward a bunch of would-be killers with an all-expense-paid life in a tropical paradise.

Generally speaking, I am very much in favor of protecting the sanctity of life and all that such entails. However, at this point, wouldn’t it have been better if, say, those individuals instead just “accidentally disappeared” from the face of the earth?  Like, a “whoops, our machine guns somehow went off” and now those fighters are taking a dirt nap?  Is it really worth hundreds of millions of dollars to take no action whatsoever and do nothing to make our nation safer? Isn’t that the true crime in this day and age?

Again, not saying I’m for just eliminating everyone at Gitmo, but wouldn’t that at least make more sense in a way than what we actually are doing?