There was a curious hiatus in the United States in 2009 when President Obama so swiftly announced he was getting rid of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within just a few months.
Liberals, with their usual depth of stupendous misunderstanding, stood up and cheered. While anyone who seemed to know anything, especially the supreme professionals in the US security forces, stood there aghast -- Huh? You're gonna do what?!
I had already begun a new novel, which was designed to walk people through the pure impossibility of shutting the doors of Guantanamo and sending all the inmates home.
And the questions were basic, based on the new and somewhat chilling circumstances where US courts were about to start freeing the prisoners because they ought not be held indefinitely without trial.
Question One: What do you do with them once they are freed -- put them on a bus and tell them to get on with their lives?
Question Two: Put them on a US transatlantic aircraft and tell them not to come back? (But what if the foreign country where the plane lands refuses to let them disembark?)
Question Three: How do you persuade a foreign airline to get them out of the US?
Question Four: On the grounds that men are not incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay for shoplifting, what do you do about truly lethal terrorists who are sworn to attack, murder and maim US citizens, military and civilian, until the end of their days?
Question Five: Can such killers be tracked, and then eliminated, by US anti-terrorist operators, for their known crimes against humanity? Not hardly, since they were just found not guilty of anything by a United States Court.
Question Six: Would it be illegal for the CIA or the military to go after these characters in any way? Plainly yes, because they could only do so in flagrant defiance of the Laws of the United States.
Question Seven: Well, what do we do after President Obama's judges, anxious to please the new liberal Commander-in-Chief, sets them all free, and the military is forced to close down the great Cuban detention camp ? Presumably put on our hard-hats, and wait for these crazy bastards to blow up the Empire State Building, as they are surely sworn to do.
Question Eight: What if a US Court finds a group of these terrorists guilty of crimes against humanity ? What do we do with them? Where do we put them? For How long?
The problems were plainly endless. And the entire US security network collectively shook its head. Because there was only one rock-solid solution: leave the Guantanamo Bay prison camp exactly where it is.
Because it's not only a living deterrent to enemies of the United States, but also because it's the most priceless source of intelligence, gathered on a daily basis from incarcerated killers, whose determination to continue the fight against the West breaks down under US interrogation.
Anyway, with this seething unrest going on throughout Washington, I somewhat gleefully crafted a novel, centered around the mighty Lieutenant Commander Mackenzie Bedford, and titled it, Intercept. It's an international thriller, with all-too-realistic consequences, concerning US liberal attitudes toward the most dangerous men on the planet.
The sting in this letter lies in the tail. I delivered the novel to my publishers, on time, and crackling with adventure, murder and mayhem. And, the very next day President Obama announced he would not be closing down Guantanamo Bay in quite such a hurry. It looked to me like he had re-thought the entire thing.
The coincidence was so great, I actually called my editor-in-chief to ask whether she had sent the manuscript immediately to the White House as a general guide to the President not to go soft on us!
Intercept comes out in May. Though I say it myself, it's not just a page-turning yarn, it sails very close to the wind, and I think it might turn out to be quite important.
Intercept is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Click here!
Patrick Robinson is the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of Lone Survivor and A Colossal Failure of Common Sense - the inside story of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.He can be contacted through his Facebook Group.