As I was reading the Miami Herald yesterday, my attention was arrested by this headline: Seminole leader demands Obama apology. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the Prez had done to piss off the Seminoles, so I read on. Indeed, I had to read the article twice before I fully understood it.

Seems the Seminoles are upset that some military lawyers were using them as an example of “enemy combatants” to defend a military commission’s conviction of Osama bin Laden’s media secretary. These hot-shot lawyers went all the way back to 1817 to find a precedent, and man, it’s a doozy:

The court document submitted by three senior military attorneys described the Seminoles in 1817 and 1818 as unlawfully resisting Gen. Andrew Jackson’s invasion of then-Spanish Florida, a cross-border incursion designed in part to stop Georgia’s slaves from escaping to freedom.

Jackson ordered two British merchants who were in Florida at the time to face military trials for helping the Seminoles and slaves — the source of the legal precedent for the authority of the Guantánamo war court to capture and put on trial foreign men accused of aiding the enemy in another country.

The two British men were executed.

I can see why the Indians are angry.

Let’s recap: Andrew Jackson invaded Florida, a Spanish territory, to stop black slaves from escaping from Georgia into Florida and when the Floridians (i.e., Seminoles and a couple of Brits) resisted, they became enemy combatants, subject to execution.

It’s actually a pretty accurate precedent: The United States invaded Afghanistan to stop the spread of radical Islam, and when the Afghans resisted, their al Qaeda helpers became enemy combatants, subject to being tortured at Guantanamo or renditioned to black ops sites in third countries.

So, following the military lawyers’ thinking, if it’s OK for Jackson to invade foreign soil and embark on a mission of ethnic cleansing culminating in his 1829 Indian Removal Act, which led to the Trail of Tears and the needless deaths of thousands of native Americans, then Muslims really do have something to worry about.

The Seminoles are right — Obama should apologize for this bone-headed line of reasoning and he should apologize for not keeping his campaign promise to close Guantanamo. And then he should fire the military lawyers who used a horrible chapter from the dark days of our young nation to justify a horrible chapter from the current dark days of our benighted nation.

This just proves there is no logical argument for keeping Guantanamo open.