Prisoner exchange

For the past five plus years Attorney General Eric Holder has maintained that those being held in Guantanamo are terrorist and not prisoners of war and thus should be tried in US courts and it is illegal to hold them without a trial. This would not be a problem if they were considered prisoners of war since they can be held until the end of the war. Today The President exchanged five of these for one of our soldiers who had been held by the Taliban for the past five years. When asked about the US policy of not negotiating with terrorist the administration contended that those released were not terrorists but in fact were prisoners of war. Then the administration jumped into the murky world of semantics and said that they didn’t actually negotiate with the Taliban but worked through a neutral third party in Qatar. There is a legal requirement that congress must be given 30 days notification of any prisoner release from Guantanamo and the administration said they could ignore that because of special circumstances. This will be brought to the attention of the news media who will likely ignore it. The longer term possible problem is that this may encourage the Taliban to kidnap other soldiers and hold them for ransom. As the news broke about our trading five Guantanamo prisoners for our captured GI, the thought occurred to me that maybe we could trade the 193 convicted murderers we just released from jail for the one marine who is jailed in Mexico. The problem is that Mexico doesn’t want them. Let’ turn the tables and agree to keep them if they agree to let our soldier go free.