AS White House staffer Jane Austen put it to Sen. Darcy: “It is a truth univer sally acknowledged that a single terrorist in possession of a good bomb must be in want of patient understanding.”

Unfortunately for Washington wonks determined to deny that Islamist extremists are motivated by extremist Islam, the pride and prejudice of Allah’s butchers were on public display (again) this week.

Framed in florid quotations from the Koran, the Gitmo Five – hard-core terrorists, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed – proclaimed in a filing released by a brave military judge that “We are terrorists to the bone” who regard the charges resulting from “the blessed 11 September operations” as “badges of honor.”

Desperate to placate its blame-America supporters, the Obama administration has clamped down on news from Guantanamo. Why? After their lurid criticisms of Gitmo, the Dems now have the world’s worst killers on their hands.

And they don’t know what to do. Responsibility sucks.

At the core of our inability to cope with Islamist terrorists lies Washington’s denial that fanatical Islam is even a factor. Yet refusing to accept that Islam Gone Wild is behind the actions of al Qaeda or the Taliban is akin to insisting that sex has nothing to do with making babies.

Other factors may intensify or accelerate a terrorist’s will to slaughter the innocent. But the dark heart of the matter is that these men believe they’re on a mission from their god to punish the godless (including fellow Muslims who don’t measure up).

Yet, no matter how fiercely our enemies declare that their faith compels them to kill, our elected and appointed officials continue to insist that the terrorists don’t understand themselves – that they’re really driven by economic factors or our own foreign-policy missteps, that their savage interpretation of Islam is only a ploy . . .

Shouldn’t we pay just a little attention to what our enemies say about themselves?

Radical Islam isn’t just a smokescreen. Jihad is real. And it ain’t about who got the Coca-Cola franchise in Khartoum.

As I seethe through DC meetings (always careful to wash thoroughly afterward), I’m continually disheartened by the contortions of “experts” determined to prove that enemies who regard death as a promotion aren’t really devout, that they just need hugs and massive amounts of aid.

A few weeks back, I spoke to a roomful of senior military officers. In response to my suggestion that we should listen to what terrorists are only too glad to tell us, a foreign “counterinsurgency expert” insisted that religion simply isn’t a factor.

To buttress his claim, he cited the survey every Muslims-R-Us analyst trots out: In questioning 138,000 prisoners who passed through US hands in Iraq, barely 10 percent claimed to be motivated by Islam, while 60 percent of the violent actors said they did it for money. (The rest were just in a bad mood.)

Even if every Iraqi told the complete truth, that misses the point. This isn’t about quantity, but the quality of commitment. Terrorist movements never field a majority or even a significant minority of a population. At most, a few hundred fanatics were behind 9/11.

Anyway, who paid the did-it-for-cash bunch? The religious fanatics.

Even in ethnic struggles, such as those in the Balkans in the 1990s, the violence begins with less than 1 percent of the population armed and determined. The ranks of the violent swell for various reasons, but it’s the hard-core believers in the supremacy of their blood or faith who instigate the destruction of troubled societies.

To counter that carpetbagger’s statistics, I pointed out that a sampling of 138,000 German POWs in 1945 would have shown that fewer than 5 percent were unrepentant believers in Nazi ideology. But subtract Nazism from the German political equation, and there would’ve been no World War II in Europe. True believers shatter worlds.

As for the argument that not every terrorist lived in a state of perfect religious purity before jumping into jihad, that utterly misses the point: A society’s prevailing sense of right and wrong is shaped by centuries of religious culture. American atheists conform to behavioral values ingrained in us all by thousands of years of Judeo-Christian authority.

In the Greater Middle East, even lackadaisical Muslims have been molded by the legacy of 13 centuries of Islam. Thus Mom thinks it a splendid thing that her son strapped on a bomb and became a martyr by murdering 40 innocents in a market.

Her culture admires that “sacrifice.” Ours doesn’t.

Listen to the Gitmo Five. Unlike our Washington pols, they have intellectual integrity. They’re telling us honestly who they are and why they seek to kill us.

Our response? “They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

At 12:01 P.M. on January 20, 2009, minutes before Barack Obama was sworn in as president, the first post went up on the Obama White House website. It included a reiteration of a campaign promise Obama repeatedly made: “President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history.”

Two days later, Obama ordered the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay closed. And two days after that, on January 24, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff wrote about a Pentagon study that will provide an early test of this promise: “The report, which could be released within the next few days, will provide fresh details about 62 detainees who have been released from Guantánamo and are believed by U.S. intelligence officials to have returned to terrorist activities.”

The report was not, in fact, released within the next few days. On February 2, Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon spokesman who handles inquiries about Guantánamo, told us that the report would likely be released later that day. We were told to consult the website–defenselink.mil–that afternoon. No report. When we asked where it was, Commander Gordon wrote:
“Nothing today, please check back with me in a couple days.” We did. No report.

This pattern has repeated itself for a month. So what explains this failure to produce the report?

According to Gordon:
there may be a misunderstanding between when the updated threat analysis was delivered from DIA and the completion of an interagency review process prior to public release.
Right. So a report that was to have been released on February 2 was suddenly and inexplicably withheld.
The most transparent administration in history apparently realized that releasing a report about the recidivism of Guantánamo detainees could only complicate its effort to shut down the facility. The approximately 247 detainees still held there are the worst of the terrorists captured by the United States since 9/11. Those thought to have been low-risk releases have already been let go. And many of them turned out not to have been low-risk at all. Saudi Arabia recently published a list of its 85 most wanted terrorists; 11 of them had been detained at Guantánamo Bay.

Said Ali al-Shihri, who disappeared from his home in Saudi Arabia after spending months in a Saudi jihad rehabilitation program, recently showed up in a video posted on a jihadist website. He is now the deputy leader of al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch, which bombed the American embassy in Sana’a in September 2008. That attack killed 13 civilians, as well as six terrorists.

Mohammed Naim Farouq was released from Gitmo in July 2003. In 2006, the Defense Intelligence Agency listed him as one of the 20 most wanted terrorists operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Abdullah Saleh al Ajmi, a Kuwaiti, was detained at Gitmo, released, and then blew himself up in Mosul, Iraq, in March 2008. The attack killed 13 Iraqi soldiers and wounded dozens more.

Ibrahim Bin Shakaran and Mohammed Bin Ahmad Mizouz were both transferred from Guantánamo to Morocco in July 2004. In September 2007, they were convicted of being recruiters for Al Qaeda in Iraq.

These are detainees that the U.S. government determined were good candidates for release.

The ones who remain in Guantánamo are not. “In some cases, we do know that they’ll return to the battlefield because they’ve told us they will,” says Juan Zarate, counterterrorism czar in the Bush White House.

The question for the new president and his advisers is what is an acceptable level of risk. “They may say ‘These guys are dangerous but it’s better than keeping them,’ ” says Zarate. But “the government needs to be very clear and honest about who these guys are and take any such step to release them with our eyes wide open.”

Being clear and honest means sharing with Congress and the American public as much information as possible. Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman is calling for the report’s release: “We know that a number of detainees who have been released have returned to the battlefield to attack Americans and American interests abroad. The American people need to know what is in the report so that Congress can make an informed decision on what to do with the detainees currently held at Guantánamo and with combatants captured in the future in the war on terror.”

To be fair, the president deserves much credit for a series of key decisions he has made in the war against terrorism: 1) launching predator missiles against Taliban and al Qaeda locations in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater; 2) detaining, without trial, enemy combatants captured and imprisoned overseas, and 3) invoking the “state secrets” privilege to block a lawsuit on CIA renditions (the practice of allowing other nations to interrogate non-US citizen terror detainees).

Unfortunately, his Gitmo decision undercuts these positive actions.

It has become an article of faith among the MoveOn.org crowd and the Democratic Party’s liberal base to denounce Guantanamo as a symbol of inhumane treatment and torture. (Indeed, in his address to Congress on Tuesday, the president announced the closing of Guantanamo in the same paragraph in which he said “that is why I can stand here tonight and say . . . the United States of America does not torture.”)

Yet that symbolism doesn’t square with the real Gitmo.

Detainees at Guantanamo are treated far better than most American prisoners in the US jails and prisons I’ve inspected over the years. The unfounded accusations that are so regularly and cavalierly made about Guantanamo are a slander against the brave men and women of our armed forces, who perform their duties at that facility so professionally and under such duress.

If there’s any scandal at Guantanamo, it is that the detainees are treated too well. Consider what I observed:

* Detainees get three full meals a day with a choice of menu.

* Each detainee receives a Koran and a prayer rug.

* Arrows throughout the facility point toward Mecca.

* Detainees receive full medical treatment – including psychiatric services. There is one medical personnel for every two detainees.

* Detainees who comply with regulations are allowed out of their cells for 16 to 20 hours a day and participate in various recreational and educational activities including soccer, language training and art classes.

* Noncompliant detainees – including the hardest of the hard core – are allowed out of their cells for four to seven hours a day. (It was particularly galling to observe a vicious terrorist reclining in the sun like a Palm Beach retiree.)

* Detainees have access to live TV, books and two daily Arab newspapers plus USA Today. (I suppose it would be inhumane to subject them to The New York Times.)

* Detainees are allowed to confer to discuss courtroom strategy.

* Guards within the facility are not armed and are regularly subjected to abuse and harassment, including having human feces and urine thrown at them.

These are not just my conclusions. The Defense Department has just finished its review of Guantanamo as ordered by President Obama and determined that conditions comply with the Geneva Conventions: “No prohibited acts were found and conditions are humane.”

We are at war with Islamic terrorism. Gitmo is a major front in that war. Closing Guantanamo could well mean releasing deadly Islamic terrorists overseas or bringing them to American soil. It would be craven surrender to left-wing groups and uninformed, self-righteous world opinion. We must do all we can to convince President Obama to reverse his decision.

Rep. Pete King (R-LI) is the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee

The bastards incarcerated at Guantanamo deserve to be there in the first place. They do not deserve nor fall under the Geneva Convention because THEY ARE NOT PRISONERS OF WAR, BUT RATHER TERRORISTS FOR GOD’S SAKE AND DON’T FORGET WHO THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY STAND FOR.

In fact, these scummy lil bastards are being treated far better than prisoners in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In fact, the military has even provided these pukes with HD televisions! No shit.

Rights! There should be no rights for TERRORISTS! They are exactly what they are, a conglomerate of despicable fanatics and nutbars, who in the majority of cases, did not give their VICTIMS a second thought before cutting their heads off.

Americans have become so “politically correct” they’ve become soft and tend to “forgive and forget” such atrocities faster than most nationalities suffering similar atrocities.

‘Wonder how TERRORISTS are handled in IRAN, KOREA, SYRIA, CHINA or for that matter, RUSSIA? ‘Bet they never make it to the cell…

One cannot fight TERRORISM “civily.” TERRORISM is meant to be brutal beyond comprehension that’s WHY they do it in the first place. To strike immediate and permanent FEAR into their targets. Look at how the Israeli’s handle HAMAS… They lob a 122mm rocket into an Israeli city at anything, the Israeli’s respond with immediate and fierce bombardment that hits within 100 meters from where the rocket was launched. Such matters MUST be handled immediately and decisively otherwise, the aggressor becomes an even BIGGER BULLY.

The only reason Iran has not openly tipped the scales of its TERRORISM by attacking its neighbors is because they’re surrounded on three borders by neighbors, who KNOW EXACTLY WHO AND WHAT THEY ARE. As soon as the U.S. pulls out of Iraq WATCH what happens… IRAN will invade Iraq with the help of tens of thousands of Sadar sympathizers and then, the World will see what the “Bully” is for what it is…

Should Guantanomo be closed, it will be the beginning of a rapid “domino effect” of the US’ new World policy and strategy of backpeddling and kissing enemy asses around the World in an effort to show that we (Americans) are supposed to be FRIENDS. All it will show the World is the US’ lack to keep its BACKBONE.

STAY STRONG AMERICA. BACK OUR MILITARY. IT’S THE ONLY SOLUTION TO KEEPING TERRORISM AT BAY.

You haven’t seen dictatorship yet, but its coming within the next 4 years. Its also amusing to hear you speak of “sheeple” when people, like you, would be throwing themselves off of a cliff if Obama told them too. Take a good long look in the mirror, if you can.

I love how liberals will come to this site to trash articles that don’t agree with what THEY think. They demand evidence or proof yet provide none when they say ignorant things like “Gitmo has hurt our reputation across the world!”. What a joke.

All I know is, if anything else in this country goes BOOM! at the hands of Muslim extremists while Obamessiah is president-he’s done, and so are the democrats.