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Gitmo Is Killing Me

nytimes.com

161–170 of 539 posts

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that to close Guantanamo, you need funding to a least move the prisoners to another facility. Introducing them to the justice system would require the same. As every American should know, Congress holds the purse strings here and has denied said request. The President has no power here.

You don't need funding. Just send them home. They shouldn't be in any detention center – there is no legal reason to detain them.

> You don't need funding. Just send them home.

They would immediately try take legal action against the American administration through any and every international court available. Having been detained without sufficient evidence there is a case to answer, the US and their cohorts (let us not forget that several governments including ours in the UK have been shown to be complicit in rendition actions that deliberately circumvented international law) can't try ignore the issue with the "enemy combatants" and other such reasons without looking like complete hypocrites given how loud they shout when someone they care to defend is detained without what they consider to be sufficient evidence (Iran holding several naval officers for instance). Even more embarrassing: some of the people they are refusing to let go home to face/demand their own country's justice are American - they don't even want their own legal system anywhere near this.

tl;dr: Just letting them go would certainly not be cost free, financially or in terms of local and/or international reputation.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#162
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. All countries claim to be the best.

Really? I've never once, despite living in the EU for my entire life (in various countries), heard anyone claim the country they live is anything like "the land of the free".

Well, the UK claims to be the "Mother of all Parliaments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament#Origins , and has songs calling itself "Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Hope_and_Glory ).

I know more about UK & Ireland than others, but it's not hard to find other countries similar. France's national anthem ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Marseillaise ) is a song about overthrowing tyranny, the national motto of France is "Liberty, Freedom, Fraternity" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9,_%C3%A9galit%C3%A9... ).

All countries claim to be the best.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#163
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. All countries claim to be the best.

In EU, a number of ministers have been disgraced enough to be thrown out of politics when their cooperation with USA "extraordinary rendition" came known. Where is the outrage in USA about Gitmo - which high-ranking officials have resigned in shame (or been thrown out for being shameless) about keeping these torture centers?

Sure, and some countries had their own Gitmos. The UK had hunger strikes and imprisonment without trial during their own civil war in Northern Ireland.

It's not as black and white as "USA bad, EU good".

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#165
post #122
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial." There haven't been any charges brought against him, and his life for the past DECADE (10+ years) has been stuck in a fucking limbo. The US Government won't even let him commit suicide by way of hunger, so in essence he has absolutely no hope or choice as it currently stands.

Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake. Clearly there was someone who felt this dude was dangerous or else they wouldn't have flown him halfway around the world to "sit in limbo" there are prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and it's…

> Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake.

So you are happy with "guilty until proven innocent" and "as he might be guilty, we can't give him the chance to prove otherwise because he might fool the legal system" as a moral precedents?

If there is evidence charge him and give him a fair trial, if there isn't admit so and let him go.

> but he most probably doesn't deserve nearly half the self-righteous indignation that everyone here is displaying.

You might be right, you might be wrong. But how will we ever know one way or the other without evidence presented? This is the sort of thing we in the west regularly chide other regimes for, and we are doing it ourselves making complete hypercrits of ourselves - this is why people who care about such things are getting rather indignant about the whole thing.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president can pardon them, the president can use private money to move them. The president can be on the news every night making this an issue.

Something like a quarter of Americans also think the President is a crypto-Muslim. In the Wall Street Journal, today, for UN ambassador John Bolton and Bush Admin. legal adviser John Yoo are arguing that the administration signed up to a UN treaty intended to curb the global arms trade is really a cover for destroying the 2nd amendment and confiscating Americans' guns. I am, frankly, surprised that that nobody in the…

Impeachment is surely warranted for:

1. Assassination American citizens without trial (drone program)

2. War in Libya without congressional approval.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#167
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. All countries claim to be the best.

In EU, a number of ministers have been disgraced enough to be thrown out of politics when their cooperation with USA "extraordinary rendition" came known. Where is the outrage in USA about Gitmo - which high-ranking officials have resigned in shame (or been thrown out for being shameless) about keeping these torture centers?

Here is an obvious analysis:

The idea with terrorism against democracies is to scare the living daylight out of voters in a country. The politicians in those democracies want to win the next election do everything to stop the terror.

Afaik, most every democracy that had a serious terrorist problem over years threw out the law book -- UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, USA, etc.

It is a reaction built into democracy, if you have a better way of organizing society that is well tested, please tell me. (That "well tested" is critical; failure modes for testing systems often kills millions of people.)

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need funding. Just send them home. They shouldn't be in any detention center – there is no legal reason to detain them.

> You don't need funding. Just send them home. They would immediately try take legal action against the American administration through any and every international court available. Having been detained without sufficient evidence there is a case to answer, the US and their cohorts (let us not forget that several governments including ours in the UK have been shown to be complicit in rendition actions that deliberatel…

That doesn't make what's happening the right thing to do... Well, if we just summarily execute them, then we don't need to take care of them... It's the fiscally responsible thing to do. I mean, war crimes are war crimes.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Witch hunts were primarily a phenomenon of the early modern period, not the middle ages, during which both the political authorities and the Church repeatedly cautioned against blaming e.g poor crops on supposed witches. Also, I believe about half of witchcraft trials ended in execution - I'm not sure what the comparable rate is for Gitmo (although obviously there are no trials).

Perhaps witch hunts were just performed under a different name. See also: the Medieval Inquisition (1184–16th century) the Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834) the Portuguese Inquisition (1536–1821) the Roman Inquisition (1542 – c. 1860) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition

The medieval inquisition was indeed a witch hunt in the figurative sense but it did not hunt witches. It was primary occupied with hunting heretics (particularly Cathars). Its involvement in hunting witches started in the late 15th century at the very end of the middle ages.

Re: Gitmo Is Killing Me

#170
post #23

The hypocrisy of the New York Times in printing this is shocking. The newspaper which did so much to whip up hysteria during the years of the Bush administration now trying to raise concerns about the inmates of Guantanamo is shockingly cynical. It's a shameful state of affairs that our political process is so broken we cannot deal with this situation in a civilized fashion, with investigations, trials and an end res…

>>The newspaper which did so much to whip up hysteria during the years of the Bush administration I lived through those years, I don't recall people running around the streets of American cities in a state of hysteria.

Sure there was hysteria, right down to color-coded threat level alerts and people duct-taping their windows to protect themselves from chemical and biological attacks.

Even prominent or well-known people were afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal (a valid fear: see Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher).

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