Pat Dollard

Tweet

Diane McDaniels, whose son was killed in the Cole bombing, also declined an invitation to meet the president, saying she was too disillusioned with Obama for dropping the charges.

“My son was blown up along with 16 others. I buried body parts for three years,” she told FOX News. “I’m still suffering and now he’s withdrawing the charges?

“There’s nothing he can say to make me feel better,” she explained, adding that Obama is sending the wrong message to the American people. “He may be the president but he’s wrong.”

This is but one example. You can start with the Cole families and the September 11 families with Khalid Sheik Mohammed and crew and keep going…the trials were already well under way, with al-Nashiri’s more than halfway finished…

Star-Telegram:

Sarah Gauna Esquivel thinks that President Barack Obama overlooked her family.

The Ennis woman lost her son, Seaman Tim Gauna, in the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. But she and her family weren’t among those invited — or even informed — about Obama’s meeting last week with families of the victims of the Cole and of 9-11.

They learned about it on the TV news.

“Seems like the government forgot about us and my son,” Esquivel wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Telegram.

Gauna

Obama called the meeting in wake of public backlash from victims’ families and others regarding his order to close the Guantanamo detention center and to review how the U.S. tries suspected terrorists. Based on Obama’s directive, a military judge dropped the charges against accused Cole mastermind Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Al-Nashiri remains in prison, and the charges against him were dropped without prejudice, meaning that they could be reinstated. The CIA has admitted that al-Nashiri is among terrorist suspects subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning.Gauna, a 1997 Ennis High School graduate and a baseball star who wanted to study computers at the University of North Texas, was 21 when he died. He was one of 17 U.S. sailors killed when two jihadists detonated an explosives-laden barge alongside the $1 billion destroyer in the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000.

“We want to know what’s going on with all this,” said Gauna’s half-brother, Albert Ramirez. “Someone who admitted to masterminding what happened on the Cole, and they are dropping the charges? What’s going to happen with him?

“If they release him, where did the justice go?”

Ramirez, 27, served four years in the Navy at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth and is now in the National Guard.

Also, he said, the family is frustrated it didn’t receive notice of the meeting with Obama.

“It’s almost like we didn’t lose a family member,” Ramirez said. “It’s real hurtful.

“Did they forget about us?”

Texas concerns

Gary Swenchonis of Rockport, who lost his son Gary Jr. in the Cole bombing, was invited to Obama’s meeting but did not go. Instead, he and his wife, Deborah, told Fox News that they wrote a letter to Obama about their concerns of suspending tribunals at Guantanamo Bay.

“President Obama, now I fear these sailors who died in the service of the United States will be abandoned again,” they wrote.

“It will be one more tragedy in a long list of tragedies in the Cole attack.  . . .  Our fear is if the terrorists are tried here in our federal courts, they will go free.”

Change course?

Ramirez said he wishes Obama would change his mind about Guantanamo Bay.

“Instead of just closing down Gitmo and trying to figure out what to do with the prisoners, we should keep it open and continue the trial process and bring justice to my family and the other families as well,” he said.

Either way, U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, said, justice for the lost sailors has been “delayed too long.”

“We must be careful not to send a message to our enemies abroad that we are letting up in our prosecution of the war on terror,” Smith, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.