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RUSH: I have to tell you a little story. I had a great weekend. A bunch of my golf buddies were in town for the weekend, and we had on Saturday night some other people show up for dinner at casa El Rushbo. Vince Flynn and his wife showed up on Saturday, they had a couple book signings up in Jacksonville, and I invited him to come down, and he drove down. We got back from playing golf Saturday afternoon around four, and Vince had warned me that he would be arriving between four and five. So Vince and his wife walk in at 4:45, I’m in the library, I’m chilling out, this is the third day in a row of golf, and I’m kind of worn out, and he walks in, is the biggest chatterbox, yap yap yap yap, ‘What Obama’s going to do, policy this, policy that,’ it was funny. I’m not complaining. It was great. Vince walked in and he just launched. It was like he and I were doing this radio show. One of the things he said to me was, ‘I want you to keep your eye on this Guantanamo business. He’s not going to close it down. He’s not going to close down Guantanamo.’ And I said, ‘Vince, I don’t know. I disagree with you. I think this guy is going to close it down. I think he’s going to bring those prisoners back to the US. I think he wants them thrown into our trial system with full US constitutional rights. He’s gotta throw that to his leftist buddies, but he is a leftist, radical leftist, and I really do think this is something he intends to do.’

I cited for Vince stuff that he had not heard because he was busy book signing the last three days, like 64% of the American people approve now of Obama’s performance as president-elect. He hadn’t heard that. I said, ‘Do you also know, Vince, that well over a majority, again, of the American people say that they’re willing to wait on their middle class tax cut because they know what challenging times The Messiah faces?’ And he just started laughing and guffawing. So I said, ‘Vince, this Guantanamo business, I hope you’re right because I’ve got a thriving merchandise business down there as well,’ the Club Gitmo caps and the T-shirts and so forth. So we’re talking about this and a bunch of other things Saturday afternoon for about a half hour, 45 minutes before I had to excuse myself and go up and get cleaned up after I’ve been playing golf, get ready for all these guests that were showing up for Allen Brothers fillets. And, by the way, for the first time — I’ve had it myself — but I served a 14-pound Allen Brothers prime rib. And, folks, it was melt-in-your-mouth, it was the best, must have carved these things over an inch thick. Nobody could eat more than half of what was on the plate. It was just delicious.

Anyway, so we do the party, we have some conversations Saturday night, but I stayed away from politics because there were a couple guests there that that’s their life and just wanted to give them a break from it so we didn’t do any politics at dinner. After dinner Vince starts in again on policy stuff and what Obama will do in the CIA and he’s got confidence that once Obama gets into office he’s going to realize he’s gotta protect the country, he’s gotta rely on the CIA. I said, ‘Vince, I know you’re the expert on the CIA. You write all these books about the CIA, but, for crying out loud, Vince, you know damn well that it was the CIA and State and the defense department, the Pentagon, that were leaking every battle plan in Iraq to try to destroy the Bush policies.’ He says, ‘That’s right. You got a lot of Obama friends over there.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but these people do not look at the US with a strong military as something that they enjoy. This is not something they want.’ So we kept talking about Guantanamo and other people showed up, and I said to all these guests, ‘Hey, guess what Vince told me? Guess what Vince thinks? Vince Flynn thinks that Obama’s going to keep Guantanamo Bay open.’ So I went to bed Saturday night feeling, okay, I got it, I’m setting these guys straight.

So I get up Sunday morning, we left at 10:30 to play golf so I had a little time to do show prep. I went to the New York Times and I found a story, and I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, Vince is right — maybe.’ Here’s the story, and it’s a news analysis by William Glaberson. The headline: ‘Post-Guantanamo: A New Detention Law?’ I forgot to mention this, part and parcel of the story. There was also a story in the Washington Post, the New York Times on it was either Tuesday or Wednesday of last week about the Bush warrantless wiretap spying programs and all these executive orders that had permitted this prior to getting deals done with Congress on that, and the story is out that Obama was going to go in there and rip to shreds all these executive orders, and again the story was that Obama was going to get rid of all these spying executive orders because the world hates us because we’ve done this. And that story happened to mention all of a sudden now that these warrantless wiretap executive orders, why, they’re just fine, because they give The Messiah the flexibility he will need to protect the country.

So in that mode, the New York Times story: ‘As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system.’ That’s what he said as a candidate. ‘Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantanamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantanamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home.’ The fact is their countries don’t want them. These are 250 wandering shreds of human debris down there. These are really, really bad guys. They’re not angels that we have just maliciously taken off the streets: ‘–how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all.’

By the way, ladies and gentlemen, we had the story last Wednesday that sociologists and professionals in other fields speculated now that with Obama’s election, that white people would feel far more comfortable having a black boss. And Snerdley last week said, ‘Where do you go get a black boss?’ I said, ‘We’ll make you boss.’ So Snerdley is the boss today and so far, folks, I’m having no problems whatsoever working with a black boss. Best bosses have always left me alone. That’s the honest-to-God truth. It was the bosses that rode me and constrained me that delayed my stardom and delayed the magnificent career here. Snerdley, so far, I came in, and he even cleaned the coffee cup up. My boss came in and changed the coffee cup. My boss came in, took away the coffee pot, and gave me a bottle of water. So Snerdley is a black boss working out well today, so far. I have no complaints about it whatsoever.

Anyway, ‘What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all? That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts that has intensified since the election.’ Isn’t it amazing, Club Gitmo was a symbol of the worst of America, but now that these guys are going to be in charge of it, we have to change the way it’s looked at and we’ve got serious considerations here, if we shut this down. Now, here is civil liberties lawyer David Cole, Georgetown law professor and a critic of the Bush administration on this, in the New York Times Sunday story said, ‘You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone.’ Really? You can’t be a purest and say that there’s never a circumstance in which a country like ours can preventively detainee somebody? We’ve been hearing for the last five years that there’s no circumstance in which we could do this legally. Now all of a sudden, Obama’s people, ‘Oh, what’s going on down there is fine. We may have to keep it open because we don’t really think it would be safe to bring these people into the country, and we don’t know what would happen if they got acquitted.’

They would all be acquitted because in a US courtroom with rules of evidence and so forth, I can guarantee you that not one of these guys was read his rights by a US soldier, for one thing, and I bet they didn’t collect a whole lot of evidence that a courtroom requires when they’re out on the battlefield when they captured these guys. So Barry may flip-flop on Gitmo. So Vince Flynn turned out — we don’t know yet, but Vince, ‘I don’t believe they’re going to shut it down, they can’t Rush, these are serious guys down there, the war on terror is a serious thing,’ and I did remember predicting that once these guys got into power, they’re not going to lose this war, they’re not going to have the war on terror lost when they’re in the White House, and they’re not going to have us lose in Iraq when they’re in the White House, they’re not going to saddle themselves with defeat, and closing Gitmo would lead to that. ‘Human rights groups have been mounting arguments to counter pressure that they say is building on Mr. Obama to show toughness, perhaps by echoing the Bush administration’s insistence that some detainees may need to be held indefinitely.’ The Obama camp is pointing that out to its supporters now, and these human rights groups are trying to pressure Obama supporters and administration people, ‘Be tough, be tough and follow through on your promise here, close the place down.’

‘I’m afraid of people getting released in the name of human rights and doing terrible things,’ would not be wise for the Obama administration, said Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. ‘He said debates over Guantanamo had created a mythology that American law permitted detention only upon conviction of a crime. Locking up mentally ill people who are deemed dangerous, he noted, is an accepted American legal practice.’ All of a sudden everything George W. Bush did in fighting the war on terror is something Obama now thinks he may have to continue. And his supporters, the same people who sliced and diced George W. Bush as somebody who ripped the Constitution to shreds, who spied on people, who trampled on constitutional rights and privacy rights, are now suggesting Obama may have to rethink this and do the same thing. Now, the New York Times may not be happy about this because the last paragraph you could interpret perhaps as a warning to the vice president select.

‘In the end, the Obama administration may conclude that it is simply not feasible to seek a new preventive detention measure. Doing so could portray the new administration as following in the footsteps of President Bush, surely an unlikely goal as Mr. Obama sorts through his options.’ So they go through this whole story promoting his advisor saying, (paraphrasing) ‘Hey, what you need to do is keep the place open but write a new detention law that gives you the authority, coming under your imprimatur so that it doesn’t have ties to Bush,’ but the effect of the new law would be the same as current law. The New York Times dutifully reports that but then they warn him in the end. ‘You better not do this. If you do this you’re going to come off as no different than George W. Bush.’ But just keep in mind, folks, as I said last week Obama is too big to fail. The Drive-By Media has too much invested in him, he is too big to fail, they will continue to prop him up. So I have to publicly apologize, and I showed the story to Vince on Sunday morning. I said, ‘Vince, you may be right,’ and he smiled. He was very gracious about it and so forth. But it was a great weekend.

This is just a sample of what’s coming, folks. Everything that you have heard that made this country the most hated in the world is probably going to be continued, the area of foreign policy and defense in some fashion, because President-Select Obama will need the flexibility to protect the country and yada yada yada.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Also, in this New York Times piece ‘Post-Guantanamo — A New Detention Law?’ in which it is suggested here that obviously there’s pressure being brought to bear on Obama to shut this place down, there’s also pressure being brought to bear on him to keep it open with a new law that would be his signature law that he could then say, ‘Well, I fixed Gitmo. It’s not the way it was under George W. Bush, but unfortunately we need to keep it open,’ and so forth and so on. They’re even quote in this story from my old buddy Andrew McCarthy, who is part of the editorial board at National Review Online. He’s a former federal terrorism prosecutor. He put the blind sheik, Omar Abdel Rahman behind bars. He’s now director for the Center for Law and Counterterrorism, and they quote Andy in the New York Times piece yesterday.

‘Yeah, we have lots of information that’s reliable that tells us someone’s a threat and that cannot be proved in court,’ blah, blah, blah. Now, three weeks ago, if Andy McCarthy had been quoted in the New York Times, it would have been as a rabid Neanderthal conservative insane lunatic, an Obama hater and so forth. But now he’s got the respectability of a noted think tankist and intellectual in the New York Times. This kind of reminds me of the Judicial Watch bunch that hounded Clinton all through the nineties. And they turned around and they did something that Peter Jennings approved of, and the ABC World News Tonight treated the Judicial Watch that they despised all during the nineties with newfound respect. However, there’s a contradiction here. The New York Times story runs yesterday. Last night on 60 Minutes — and we didn’t watch this. It was our last night, all of us together, so we were reveling, watching football and some ’24.’ Steve Kroft said to Obama, ‘A number of different things you could do early. One of them is shut down [Club Gitmo]. You gonna take any action on those things?’

OBAMA: Yes. Uh… Eh, uh, er, I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that. Uh, I’ve said repeatedly that America doesn’t torture, and I’m going to make sure that we don’t torture. Uh, those are — uhh those are part and parcel of an — an effort to regain, uh, America’s moral stature in the world.

RUSH: Oh, Lordy, what are we to do now? Obama very plainly said, ‘Yes, I’m going to shut it down. It’s nothing more than a torture place.’ The New York Times has his staff and advisors looking for ways to keep it open.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So, Vince? Vince Flynn is driving down to Ft. Lauderdale to catch his flight back to Minneapolis. Vince, I may yet be right about this. Who do we rely on in this dispute? Obama says he’s gonna shut it down; there’s going to be no torture. The New York Times says his advisors are looking at ways of keeping it open. We’ll see. Obama is going to be able to get away with anything if next year he decides — and this is always going to be the out — blame Bush. Just blame Bush. He’ll get in there and say, ‘You know what? I found things about Gitmo that Bush didn’t tell us. There are things I was shocked to learn about the war on terror. We may not be able to get out of Iraq as soon as I had hoped. We may not be able to mount a surge in Afghanistan as soon as I had hoped. We may not be able to close Guantanamo as soon as I would have hoped because Bush didn’t tell us everything that was going on.’ It’s always going to be an out. It will work because the press will always support Obama in having to overcome the mess left to him by George W. Bush.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me just close the loop on something in the first hour. I am predicting Obama will close Guantanamo Bay. I’m going to go with what Obama said last night on 60 Minutes and what he said throughout his campaign. I am going to eschew the New York Times story from yesterday which claims that his advisories are coming back with ways that, under his imprimatur, that the world would love us, that he could keep it open. He’s gotta close it for the sake of his presidency. If he doesn’t close it then he’s going to give people like me a chance to define his presidency for him. By the way, grab sound bite two. I want to replay this with a little bit more time to analyze. We’ll get to that in a second. Plus your phone calls we’ll get to this hour, I promise. 800-282-2882.

Now, I want to talk about how smart Obama is. I told you the appointment of Rahm Emanuel as the chief of staff is a very smart move politically because exactly as I thought it would it got a bunch of Arab criticism. This sort of diffuses the fear that a lot of people had that Obama’s tight with Islamists because of the Hamas connection, the endorsement and so forth, and just for PR purpose. The Obama campaign’s an image, his presidency will be an image. It is symbolism over substance. There’s going to be some pretty bad substance to it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: We are going to start in Bridgewater, Virginia. Hi, Danny. Thank you for calling, and welcome to the EIB Network.

CALLER: It’s a great pleasure to talk to you, sir.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I just want to make a quick comment. I’m just kind of curious about what Obam-er is going to do with the Gitmo detainees. I guess he’s going to feather them out through the United States penal system which is already overcrowded, and I don’t know, maybe they can get together and figure out some (unintelligible).

RUSH: No, no. See, that’s the point here. There are 250 reprobates down there. Forget what you’ve heard about Gitmo and the media. The media has led people to believe that these people are basically innocent, that they just look differently than we do, and they speak differently, and that they might wear turbans, and they might, you know, pray to Mecca and read the Koran, but these are just people. And we’ve been paranoid and imperialism, we snatched them away from their families and their homes. These people are human debris. They are dangerous. They are murderers. We have released people from Gitmo and recaptured them after they have committed battlefield crimes again; they have rejoined the war on terror.

This is the reason. So during the campaign and even leading up to the campaign — I guess it would include the campaign because it went on for two years, but the left with this country along with Obama (and this is Clinton, too) were saying that the people down there, we need to close this place because it’s destroying our image in the world, that nothing goes on except torture down there. They didn’t mention the fact that all… You know what waterboarding is? Waterboarding is tricking people into thinking they’re going to drown. They don’t drown. But you trick people into thinking they’re going to drown. You feel like it, and the mastermind of 9/11 vomited everything. He told us the truth about how it all happened; and two or three of his colleagues also were convicted.

But this was portrayed as torture. This was, ‘The United States is evil!’ This was destroying our image in the world, along with Abu Ghraib and the hazing, fraternity hazing photos over there. So the left, just attacking George Bush for anything, said, ‘We gotta close it down! We gotta close it down,’ and furthermore, then the American left’s trial bar got in action here, lawyers, they said, ‘You know, these people deserve constitutional rights. We have held them illegally. We’ve held them without charging them. We have put them in squalid conditions.’ We got all the stories about flushing the Koran down the toilet, all that BS, and that was from some guy at Newsweek. His name escapes me now. Yeah, Isikoff, the Lewinsky guy. He spiked a story and Drudge got it and the rest is history.

So the American people don’t like their country being hated. They think that they don’t like it and we need to repair our image. We have a national psychosis problem and that is that way too many people give a damn what people think of us. They give a damn what people think of them individually, and I’m telling you, that’s death. That’s destructive. It just stunts your growth. When you start giving a rat’s rear end what people think of you, and live your life that way individually it’s bad enough, but when the people in the country, when a majority of Americans start worrying what they think about us in these various hellholes that harbor people who want to kill us, then we’re in trouble.

The Bush administration did not adequately defend itself, as they now admit, against these charges, and so the clarion call began. ‘We’ve gotta close Gitmo, and because we’ve mistreated these poor people that we’re holding down there, we need to give them trials. Not military tribunals, but trials. We need to introduce them to the US court system in the United States, and give them fair trials. The world will respect us again because we are a beacon for that kind of thing.’ Okay. So we’ve got 250 of the dregs of society. Now, you bring ’em up here and you put ’em in the American judicial system — these are prisoners of war — you can examine every aspect of their capture. ‘Were you read your rights?’ Can you imagine bringing the CIA in?

The CIA is not going to go for this. Can you imagine bringing the CIA in to testify as to how this prisoner happened to be captured? ‘Did you violate the privacy rights of the prisoners? Did you violate any other human rights of the prisoner? Have you mistreated the prisoner?’ So the question of acquittals? I mean, you got an Oprahized bunch people as a jury (who already think the American system here is guilty for what they’ve done to these people), and I guarantee you, you’re looking at acquittals. So you acquit these people, and then what do you do with them? The places they’re from don’t want them back. No other country wants them. You just turn ’em loose? Let’s say you bring one to Kansas City for trial or St. Louis. You release ’em there after they’re acquitted?

They’re not guilty. What do you do with them? I mean, after they’ve been acquitted, folks, you can’t say, ‘Well, ship ’em out of the country,’ ’cause they don’t have papers. Well, about 12 million others don’t, either. And we’re not shipping them out of the country, at least in great numbers. So what do you do? So you’re going to have these people running around? So this is a serious component of closing down Gitmo. What do you do with the people there? And I’m telling you that there are a lot of leftists in this country who do not like this country who want those people in this country for trials. They want show trials. They want the United States being found guilty of charges them illegally, capturing them illegally, torturing them. There are a bunch of leftist radical lawyers in this country that come from the same school Obama did that would love for that to be the result, because they know that they’re a bunch of weepy-eyed journalists and mainstream media people who would then carry the water even further with documentaries.

‘How did this happen to our country? Here is Ali Akbar Samazu Sahib Skyhook,’ and we’ll get documentaries on his poor family. ‘He came from disadvantaged circumstances. He was caught up in a case of mistaken identity. He professed his innocence through thought of many months of his illegal incarceration at the hands of George Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney,’ and the nation will be made to feel sorry for this guy and other compatriots. ‘While Rush Limbaugh profited from this with his Club Gitmo licensed merchandise,’ and they’ll show pictures of our T-shirts and caps and all the things that are in the EIB Store for Club Gitmo. (Still a thriving business, I might add.) This will all happen, and the American people should feel good about their country again. ‘Why, here’s old Sahib Skyhook finally released after months of torture and illegal imprisonment,’ and we’ll be loved again.

We will love the fact that people love us! In the meantime, 250 people who have sworn an allegiance to kill as many Americans as possible will be out walking the streets; and then Skyhook, after all this… Remember, now, he’s been acquitted in a US court with constitutional rights. What happens in that case? Good old Sahib Skyhook sues! He sues for damages. (laughs) Lost wages, whatever economic duress and stress, loss of conjugal relations with his wives, all this stuff. And of course our Oprahized jury will be so damn weepy and sorry that they’ll give this guy the moon because the government will be paying and the government has an endless supply of money, ‘Why, look, we’re bailing this guy out, this person out and that business out. It’s only fair, it’s only right that we treat these people properly.’

So the very people that want to create more 9/11s are going to be paid to do it by us. We could call this… In fact, I’ll tell you, if this happens, if Obama shuts down Club Gitmo, I’m going to give it a name. We’re going to call it The Terrorist Bailout Plan. We’re essentially going to bail these people out. In fact, we’ll probably make a settlement with them before any lawsuit. We’ll just say, ‘Here’s a lump sum.’ We’ll call Osama bin Laden and say, ‘Will this handle it?’ Or if he’s dead (which I happen to believe; I still don’t think Osama’s been alive all these years, but regardless) give it to Ayman al-Zawahiri. Or, better yet, call up Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and see if he’ll take the money and have his nuclear program go away or whatever.

But, look, we’re exaggerating in some ways here, but this is what’s going to happen. If they bring ’em here for trial, I don’t know how you find ’em guilty. Because the left is going to give them the best defense lawyers they can find, and lawyers will take the case. These are not going to be pro bono cases. The government will pay legal expenses because of the guilt George Bush made us all feel and so forth. So it is a crucial thing. You might ask, ‘Rush, why bring ’em here for trial? Why not just close it and ship ’em…? Nobody wants them! You can’t just send these guys off to a country that doesn’t want ’em. ‘Well, how come they’re where we don’t want them?’ Because we have the responsibility of the world, as the superpower, on our shoulders to lead in this regard.

These people, they don’t just kill Americans. They’ve killed, maimed tons of people, lots of people. So we can’t just release ’em. But, more than that (and don’t doubt me) as extreme and odd as this sounds, I guarantee you there are people like Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, Tom Hayden, these guys from the sixties who would love for these guys to be brought to trial and win and have the US shamed and have to pay off. Obama is out there guaranteeing to close the place down, and if he can’t just send ’em on a boat someplace, you have to bring ’em here for trial, if you close it down. Because, see, the basis for closing it down is that these people are being held without charges. But they’re not US constitutional rights-possessing citizens. But we want to transfer those rights to them for the purposes of this trial.

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