Terrorists

When we incarcerate criminals, we do so for three reasons. The first is to protect the public, the second is to exact penance and the third is to rehabilitate the felons themselves. This works fairly well in the first instance and also the second. Number three has a pretty spotty record.

Rehabilitation is predicated on the idea that the criminal understands, on some level, that what they are doing is wrong and that if we can just tap into that somehow, the felon will see the error of their ways and head down the straight and narrow path. This does not work with terrorists. They are convinced they are right and that their methods are perfectly just.

I bring this up specifically because of Sara Jane Olson, AKA Kathleen Soliah, a convicted urban terrorist who is being released, I believe today, to finish out her sentence as a parolee in Minnesota.

I also bring it up because President Obama keeps getting closer to letting bygones be bygones vis-à-vis the Guantanamo Bay detainees. I have a queasy feeling that he is going to hem and haw a lot as he lets most of them go one by one.

I’m glad he wants to stop torturing them, and water boarding is torture in my opinion. We don’t torture people, even terrorists here in America. But letting them go is something else entirely.

I’m very uncomfortable with the due process issues where the detainees are concerned. I have no doubt that had they been picked up on a street corner on some drug charge, they would have been sprung in a day or two, and the charges dropped a week later for lack of evidence.

I get it. Really.

But everyone knows these are bad guys. Some are worse than others but they are all very dangerous. When we start getting all sanguine about the time that has passed and start thinking they have learned their lesson, we are seriously mistaken.

They hate us. That is fairly common. They are fanatics. That in and of itself simply means it is pointless to try and convince them otherwise.

They are dangerous fanatics who are willing to put their ideas into action. If we let them go, they will.

The president needs to reconsider his plans.