Saturday, May 9, 2009

Jihadis moving to the suburbs of D.C.

How would you like your family’s next-door neighbor to be a former Guantanamo Bay inmate who was trained in a military camp in pre-9/11 Afghanistan? Would it matter if they were declared no longer to be an “enemy combatant” by the Pentagon?

That’s the fundamental question that ought to be going through the minds of Northern Virginia residents this week, amid news reports - including our own Daily News exclusive today - that a group from Gitmo may soon be making house in the D.C. suburbs. Officials tell The News the ethnic Turk Muslims from China, known as Uyghurs, will be settled in a Uyghur community in Fairfax, Va. - if Team Obama gives the thumbs up.

While Republicans have unarguably been making political hay out of this news - as well as the release of the Bush-era “torture memos” and President Obama’s plan to close Gitmo by January - they are indeed representing the views of many counterterror officials by objecting strenuously to plans to resettle a half-dozen former detainees in the D.C. suburbs.

“There are people in the intelligence community who are concerned about the Uyghurs from a security standpoint,” Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), ranking GOPer on the Homeland Security Committee, told The Mouth. “They have very real worries.”...

No kidding, real worries. These guys were found in a terrorist training camp. They will be released into the community and quickly disappear. They will turn up in an attack in the US. You can bet on that. I say their pictures need to be released to the public. We can keep an eye on them.

No comments: