Caravan

The first 100 members of the Central American caravan are expected to reach the US this weekend. The US Army isn’t expected to roll out the welcome wagon.

Expect the fearmongering of Donald Trump to swing into high gear as the arrival date of the caravan’s vanguard approaches.

In the cavalcade of lies and deception employed by Trump to keep his political base aroused, the tweeter-in-chief has trotted out the specter of terrorists from the Middle East embedded within the caravan on a mission to wreak havoc throughout TrumpLand.

Trump supporters are supposed to rest assured that the president is doing everything in his power to keep the bad guys in check.

That’s simply not the case.

While the president warns of make-believe terrorists walking north through Mexico, the Trump administration has no clue about the whereabouts of battle-hardened insurgents who have been released from the Guantanamo prison.

McClatchy reported Nov. 13 that our tweeter-in-chief (perhaps in his mission to overturn everything touched by Barack Obama) shut down the Office of the Special Envoy for Guantanamo Closure.

“President Trump’s State Dept. emptied the office to underscore his campaign promise to keep open the US military prison in Cuba, which today has 40 detainees,” reported McClatchy’s investigative team.

The Office’s mission was to trace ex-Gitmo prisoners who were transferred to 30 different countries including Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan and Oman for rehabilitation, resettlement and safe haven.

Many of the resettlement deals eventually fell apart and former detainees fell off the US radar.

Citing estimates from the Office of National Intelligence, McClatchy reported about 30 percent or 222 former Guantanamo captives—“have or are suspected of having returned to militant or terrorist activities after leaving the wartime prison. Of those, 196 men were among the 532 captives repatriated by the Bush administration.”

The US doesn’t know where these guys are, but you can bet that they aren’t in the caravan heading into the arms of the US Army.