Posted on 03/09/2011 8:32:50 AM PST by bestintxas
President Obama quietly signed an executive order on Monday instituting a system for indefinitely holding terrorist detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), Cuba. The administration also announced that terrorist trials by military commission would recommence. This is a win for U.S. security, but the country has paid a heavy price for Mr. Obama’s on-the-job training in counterterrorism.
The low-key announcements stand in marked contrast with the bombast with which Mr. Obama approached this issue just a few years ago. During the 2008 presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama harshly criticized President George W. Bush’s detainee policies. When he took office, Mr. Obama theatrically announced that he would close Gitmo in a year and find a way to give the terror detainees the full due-process rights enjoyed by American citizens. In so doing, he legitimized the complaints of the worst critics of American counterterrorism policies, including the terrorists themselves.
Two years later, some learning appears to have occurred at the White House. The president’s hasty “close Gitmo” pledge foundered on practical and political grounds. Contrary to the story line peddled by anti-war alarmists, the Bush administration already had released most of the detainees that had been held there, and those who remained were the hard cases who truly threatened U.S. national security. Trying the detainees in civilian courts raised a multitude of nettlesome questions about public evidence, speedy trials, Miranda warnings and the other aspects of due process that didn’t support the Bush administration’s warfighting approach.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Any totalitarian is a criminal to “free people”. The Totalitarian-in-Chief, his sycophants, anti-individual collectives, and enablers wage asymmetric low-simmer war on freedom-loving individuals every day.
Witness history.
I do not know if obama is a war criminal, but that he is a punk and a traitor is without doubt.
Hopefully the press will pay a price too.
obama would have to lose by at least 15% to cover the voter fraud and voter intimidation by the unions and the black panthers. I used to say 10% but it’s gotten worse.
And bush could have done something about this. I’ll always believe he and mccain and all the gop elite were in on this scam of the American people.
I won’t flame you. w could have taken enough of Iraq’s oil to pay our costs. He could have said “Islam is our enemy”. Instead he said “Islam is a religion of peace.” If that’s true then who the hell are we fighing?
When this started I told my wife “We’ll never win this war because we’re not willing to do what will need to be done to win it.”
What nobody is paying attention to is the other thing Obama announced when he announced that Gitmo will stay open: He dclared that he was going to seek the ratification of Protocol 1, an amendment to the Geneva Convention that essentially gives terrorists (that is, non-uniformed, non-state combattants) the status of military prisoners of war. This has been opposed by every President from Reagan onwards, although it’s long been a favorite cause of the left and the anti-war crowd.
If this is the case, these people would then become POWs with all the according protections and privileges, and this would affect their trial, too. So this issue is by no means resolved just because Gitmo is staying open.
PS: is there an address for transcript?
I agree we should have helped ourselves to the oil in Iraq, in addition President Bush should have put in an Executive Order to start our own drilling. If that could have been done.
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