The Fallacy of "The Closing Gitmo Because It's a Recruitment Tool for Jihadists" Argument

President Obama, in a manner as predictable as a rerun of Three's Company, stated in his plans to close Guantanamo Bay yesterday that it must be done because its existence is a recruitment tool for jihadists.

Obama has been saying this for years. But he also said last November that Republican opposition to the settlement of Syrian refugees is a recruitment tool for ISIS.

The idea that the only thing standing between ISIS beheading a journalist, raping a relief worker or setting a Jordanian pilot ablaze is our Syrian refugee policy much less the existence of Gitmo is rubbish. ISIS looks at America and the West as infidels who deserve a violent death and are also perfectly happy to murder fellow Muslims they deem to be insufficiently Islamic. This is their mission, Gitmo or no Gitmo.

Even if Gitmo does motivate people to join ISIS that is hardly a reason to close it. We can hardly have our foreign policy dictated to us by jihadists. On that basis, we would stop supporting Israel, remove our military bases from Saudi Arabia and not permit women to vote much less drive.

If Obama really wants to close Gitmo and assuming he isn't prepared to execute its remaining inmates (as Kevin Williamson suggests) then he had better be prepared to tell us where he wants to put them.

Let's put it even more simply. Republicans, be they presidential candidates or not, should ask President Obama where he thinks 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should reside for the rest of his miserable life.