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Dubya Bush - "may he ­always duck flying shoes" - made a huge mistake in grabbing people from all four ­corners and six continents and jamming them into the American concentration camp at Guantanamo in Cuba.

Even as he was doing that, I knew - didn't believe, but KNEW - that he would have an insurmountable problem in dealing with his inmates.

Dubya sought to get around that by making oral law.

He sought to invent an ­entirely new category of 'enemy combatant'. 

Mankind has been ­warring for thousands of years. 

Over this period, we have evolved global rules.

Dubya sought to circumvent them and failed.

Risks

Enter Barack Obama. A realist. Either he maintained that concentration camp - in 2009 it was ­simply a deathless Auschwitz - or he could eliminate it.

In eliminating it he had three options.

n Put every inmate on trial under generally accepted legal principles - and take the risk that most would go free - thus giving every American proof the U.S. had acted badly.      

n  Free every inmate against whom a trial was unlikely to succeed and ­proceed to trial with the rest (and take the risks as set out above).

n  Take the Hitlerian ­solution and shoot them all.

Obama chose ­option two and it landed him with a problem.

Was he going to send every person back home, thus blatantly acknowledging a huge wrong?

Or, in a bid to save face, would he send these ­unfortunate ­victims to places where they could start filtering back to their home?

Glossy sheen

Clearly, with the deal just struck with the Bermuda Government, Obama is ­trying to save face.

Backed by Bermuda's need to have damn good economic relationships with the U.S. - and faced by economic threats from the Obama-led Government - our Government is ­seeking to curry favour. Need met need.

So Bermuda sucked up, put a glossy sheen on the whole matter and agreed to accept four unfortunates who should never have been put in that concentration camp in the first place.

Wheeling and dealing in human misery for economic gain?

It reminds me of those old 'white guys' who said they were bringing ­'Christianity' to the black Africans stumbling along in slave coffles.  

I accept that the four Uighurs should be ­re-settled here.

But I object to anyone saying that we're doing it for ­humanitarian reasons. Did we only just discover ­humanity in June 2009? 

Did we not have it when these four men were ­arrested or at any time ­during the 3,000 days of their imprisonment?

What about Bermuda ­taking in refugees from Darfur, Rwanda, Congo or Haiti for humanitarian ­reasons?

Just be honest about the whole situation.

Tell me that we're doing it because we want to stay in bed with America - and it seems that we will even trade in human beings if we have to.

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