From Sam Stein at The Huffington Post:
The Obama administration called on Thursday for the closure of Guantanamo Bay within the next year. The move will be greeted with widespread approval around the world, the end of a blotch on America's image abroad. Coming in the form of an executive order, it carries with it the power of law.
I pray that it won't take a year to close it down.
Even better, I think, is his signing an executive order forbidding torture. It's like we're waking up after a bad nightmare.
ReplyDeleteDe-doing it in the same manner as it was done...
ReplyDeleteI'm praying that the terrorists will be able to come to America, realize how much we really do love them and assimilate into our society. Because there's nothing better than giving killers due-process and a better opportunity to finish their job.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great day for our nation. And once the President can figure out what the hell he just signed (without it being explained to him mid-press conference), perhaps we can focus on our own murderers going free. Woo-hoo!
Brrrrrrack-O (please roll the r's)
Oh, dear, the anonymous trolls are back
ReplyDeleteIgnore him/her.
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ReplyDeleteBO, thanks but one was enough. We get your drift.
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ReplyDeleteActually, it will take a year: due process, which is what we need here, takes time. Some subset of the people at Gitmo are still very dangerous, and need to be treated as such, ending up in maximum security places somewhere, where others are more or less people who were guilty of low-level crimes if anything, and who should be released. (Then there is the small subset whom the Pentagon admits were innocent but who they don't want to release into the US but whose home countries refuse to take them back.) And the issue of who was tortured, and what effect that should have on their ongoing trials, is going to be very big.
ReplyDeleteI know it needs to be done ASAP, but better to take a little more time and do it right.
Pat, I'd want it to be done right, too. Some of the most dangerous of those at Gitmo were probably tortured, so one wonders if the courts will rule that they can never have a fair trial.
ReplyDeleteThe Bush maladministration may have done irreparable harm to our system of justice, with who knows what result for the most dangerous of the prisoners.
I have the same fear, Mimi.
ReplyDeleteIgnore him/her. We have no evidence and cannot win in an arena of ideas.
ReplyDeleteJoey T, who is "we"?
ReplyDeleteClose Gitmo - open what, where? These are not criminals - but terrorists. Since when are wartime detainees entitled to due process?
ReplyDeleteOh, I was just repeating your banishment of the other guy.
ReplyDeleteBush may have done a lot of things wrong, but national defense was not one of them. I think that your (et al) comments are wrong here. Sorry
This country believes in the idea of innocent until proven guilty. The problem with Gitmo is that Bush & Co wanted to skip out on the responsibilities of treating these men as criminals because, oops, we can't prosecute them based on the poor evidence we have, and yet, they also didn't want to treat them as prisonersof war because, oops, then we'd have to follow the Geneva Convention and how could we get away with the torture ...er I mean the information gathering techniques that might be viewed poorly under the Geneva Convention. If they are "dangerous" 5+ years of mistreatment, solitary confinement, etc. has certainly guarranteed their hatred of this country. Thank God for President Obama (I love saying that) because now it's time to sh*t or get off the pot with these prisoners. Transfer them to a federal prison in the US and try them or deport them to a place in the globe that will take them.
ReplyDeletePlease don't post as anonymous. Make up a name.
ReplyDeleteEveryone deserves due process, even terrorists. The Bushies have already released hundreds from Gitmo, because the US could find no evidence that they had done anything wrong, except be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or because someone turned them in to settle a vendetta - some of them after they had been tortured.
Bush may have done a lot of things wrong, but national defense was not one of them. I think that your (et al) comments are wrong here. Sorry
Sorry, Joey T, you are wrong. The US in a much more dangerous position after 8 years of the Bush maladministration.
And what Renz said.
Your comment is nonsensical, Mimi. I don't mean to challenge your source from this (as I do not know what it is), but I do know mine. And it does not follow that after a terrorist attack that has not been repeated on our soil that we are not safer now than eight years ago. Perhaps your disdain for this man (a fellow believer, mind you) has coloured your lenses too much.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot simply say that I am wrong without more concrete evidence. But I fear that a blog will not change your mind anyway.
BO, I have been bombed by trolls from your side, but if I take the trouble to comment on another blog, I use my Blogger name. You don't have to tell me about being bombed. I've been through it.
ReplyDeleteI'm thankful your man and Joey's man lost. He dragged the country down far enough and disgraced us in our own eyes and the eyes of the whole world. Good riddance! Bush didn't go out at at 22% approval rating for nothing.
Joey T, think Pakistan with its weak government and nuclear weapons. What did Bush do about that?
ReplyDeleteI'm not going to spend my night arguing with you, and I'm not going to prove the last 8 years to you. Where have you been? In a bunker with Dick Cheney?
Oh my goodness. Where do some of these people come from? How do you justify torture, annonymous and others? It is not even pragmatic. People will tell you what you want to hear just to get it to stop. But beyond that, it is inhumane and wrong and there is no justification for it. For God's sake, we all think the behavior of the terrorists is wrong, and that they must be stopped, but we accomplish nothing; we stand for nothing; if we do inexplicable and dispicable things that we know are wrong.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't get "hit" again because 9/11 was the big payoff for those bastards - what has kept us safe has been the knowledge that if a plane is hijacked we know now to fight back - the Bushies did a Casablanca - "round up the usual suspects" and through them into Gitmo and its been a global embarrassment ever since - I particularly like the case of the Canadian youth who was 14-15 when he was sent to Gitmo 5 years ago - he may have killed a GI with a hand grenade. That doesn't sound like a terrorist to me - it sounds like an enemy combatant and an underaged one to boot - lots of German, Japanese, North Korean, and Viet Cong prisoners of war killed GI's as well. We didn' lock them up indefinately as part of some bogus PR campaign to justify to the country that we were serious on terror - we are guity of "disappearing" people, just like some of the cozy countries in South America in the 1970's. But, hey, there were no more "attacks," TGFB(thank God for Bush-retch) - and hey, there wasn't any nuclear war - TGFB, the sky didn't fall - TGFB, no political assassinations - TGFB, no more Rocky movies - TGFB...the absense of something does not mean that something was prevented. It's asinine to make that argument.
ReplyDeleteMimi, I truly am sorry to have "trolled" your blog and threatened the pleasantry of your evening.
ReplyDeleteI agree: Bush did not leave with 22% approval rating for nothing. It was all-or-nothing on this war. And history forgets approval numbers and sees what was right and wrong.
Good Night. I will try and not bother your blog anymore. But, as I go, what was the Democratic Congress approval rating? Single digits? Are we to measure with these polls or not?
Oh, and renzmqt - No, the absence of terrorist attacks does not mean it was prevented. But the active stopping of plots and catching loaded guns does have a way . . .
ReplyDelete. . . I would suppose you have no idea how close we come . . .
Joey T, first off, I didn't call you a troll.
ReplyDeleteAnd just so you'll know, I've been no great admirer of the Congress over the past 8 years, not even the Democrats, with exceptions for those who tried their best to get their colleagues to do the right thing, but unfortunately did not always succeed.
You have a good night.
Mimi,
ReplyDeleteI for one am glad the President is closing GTMO. I was there when we opened it (part of the fleet hospital treating the wounds of the detainees), and I can tell you that it was never meant to go on this long. We knew that 95% of them were just some poor schmucks who were given weapons and told to fight, but we didn't know which ones, and so many of them were sick and wounded and needed help. I remember one guy we brought back from the brink of death from TB in particular, and the amputations that had to be done to save alot of them. My unit did a lot of good at the time.
Some of those guys are bad men. When he first arrived, David Hicks swore he would "kill an American before I leave". That's the scary part to me. I believe in due process, and I am ashamed of what GTMO became, but when it started we were trying to sort the bad guys from the good,treat all the wounded and hopefully get information WITHOUT torture. When I was there the mere mention of that word was shunned for fear of being accused of it. I used to be proud of the things I did there... and still am of the accomplishments. But all the allegations of torture after I left, what it became, I am horribly ashamed of the whole mess. You shouldn't be ashamed to serve your country, but there it is. Thank you Mr. Bush and Chaney.
Beryl, you're right - it's self-defeating to use torture as an interrogation technique. It doesn't result in good intelligence. And, of course, as you point out, it's morally wrong. There's another reason not to torture, too, and that's that it puts our own service members at risk of being tortured should they fall into enemy hands. Of course, Al Qaeda would probably torture just for grins, but there's no guarantee that if we start torturing suspected terrorists that we won't end up with torture as a general principle.
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