Fox News is famous for its outrageous and pervasive mean-spiritedness, but suggesting, as Kimberly Guilfoyle did on the December 18 edition of The Five, that the way to deal with Gitmo is to “Just Kill Them All And Close Gitmo,” is a new, appalling low.
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
ERIC BOLLING (CO-HOST): So, we’ve just solved the terror problem?
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KIMBERLY GUILFOYLE (CO-HOST): He’s so bad, that’s not even like an F in class. He’s got to repeat the year, because he’s so confused. Does he think, what’s his excuse going to be when he closes Gitmo and they’re all like jihadi delight together in Yemen and other places, like regrouping. What’s he going to blame it on then? That’s his counter terrorism strategy?
GERALDO RIVERA: You avoid the main point. Guantanamo Bay prison camp was invented to evade the Constitution of the United States. They wanted to have prisoners but in a place where they would be …protected from habeas corpus, they wanted a place where they’d have no Constitutional rights.
GREG GUTFELD: The Constitution doesn’t apply when you’re at war with enemy combatants. This is a new turf.
GUILFOYLE: I agree, I agree! Just kill them all and close Gitmo, that’s fine. They don’t have to come here, they don’t have to stay there.
Nothing like a little Nazi-style judicial murder. Fox News doesn’t care about due process, or about the Supreme Court ruling in 2008 (Boumediene v. Bush) that detainees at Gitmo have habeas corpus rights.
Then there is the little issue that the United States is supposed to be a force for good in the world.
It’s hard to be good when you’re murdering people because their existence is inconvenient. There is no difference between lining men up and beheading them and lining them up and putting a bullet into the back of their heads. Dead is dead.
Murder is murder.
President Obama has tried again and again to close the abomination that is Gitmo. He has been blocked at every turn, even being accused of lawlessness for wanting to close an illegal prison (Guilfoyle is wrong, releasing detainees doesn’t grow terrorism, keeping them there does).
And never mind facts, like the fact that Bush released 500 detainees from Gitmo without having his counter-terrorism strategy mocked by Fox News.
If Gitmo and the evil that has transpired there in the name of the war on terror, is a stain on America’s reputation abroad, Fox News is no less so. Fox News and its never-ending gospel of hate represents everything that is wrong with America, and if they had set out to do a recruiting commercial for the Islamic State, they could not have done a better job.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
