As many other observers did, the Wall Street Journal editors comment:

The President went out of his way to insist that its existence “likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained,” albeit without offering any evidence, and that it “has weakened American security,” again based only on assertion. What is a plain fact is that in the seven-plus years that Gitmo has been in operation the American homeland has not been attacked.

It is also a plain fact — and one the President acknowledged — that many of the detainees previously released, often under intense pressure from Mr. Obama’s anti-antiterror allies, have returned to careers as Taliban commanders and al Qaeda “emirs.” The New York Times reported yesterday on an undisclosed Pentagon report that no fewer than one in seven detainees released from Gitmo have returned to jihad.

This is, of course, entirely non-factual and illogical. The 9-11 plot and the prior string of attacks on American interests in the 1990’s preceded use of Guantanamo as a terrorist safehouse. And it defies logic to think that had the detainees been housed in Colorado as Sen. Diane Feinstein now suggests (Colorado votes “no” on that idea, by the way), recruiting would have suffered in jihadist circles. (If memory serves me correctly, it used to be in the Left’s playbook that Iraq was the terror recruiter’s dream, but that seems patently silly now that it has become a killing field for Al Qaeda.) It is an unsupported (and unsupportable) bit of sloganeering, necessitated by Obama’s unwillingness to confront the uncomfortable reality that we must put these people somewhere, and that Guantanamo is no more objectionable a place than a prison in Colorado or California (what say you about that, Speaker Pelosi?).

Next time the CIA is briefing Congress, one of the lawmakers should ask about the president’s assertion: where is the evidence that Guantanamo aided our enemies? I suspect the query would be greeted by blank stares. What we do know is that Al Qaeda is a shell of its former self, in part because we fought a war in Iraq which Obama bitterly opposed and wished to abandon. What we do know is that those who pressured the administration to release detainees (on the theory that they weren’t all that bad) had it wrong. So when it comes to advocating policies that “weakened American security,” Obama and his netroot supporters are in a class of their own.