Posted on 11/15/2008 10:14:18 PM PST by Jay777
Remember one of Obama's promises to his liberal base that he would close Gitmo? Day one he said.
Suddenly, civil liberty lawyers, the NY Times, and Barack himself are adopting the Bush doctrine. Perhaps sniping from the sidelines was easier than facing the complexity of reality.
As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system.Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers. They include where Guantánamo’s detainees could be held in this country, how many might be sent home and a matter that people with ties to the Obama transition team say is worrying them most: What if some detainees are acquitted or cannot be prosecuted at all?
That concern is at the center of a debate among national security, human rights and legal experts that has intensified since the election. Even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted.
“You can’t be a purist and say there’s never any circumstance in which a democratic society can preventively detain someone,” said one civil liberties lawyer, David D. Cole, a Georgetown law professor who has been a critic of the Bush administration.
Huh? I seem to remember the majority of liberals arguing that if we can not give Constitutional rights to terrorists, try or release them, then the terrorist had already won.
(Excerpt) Read more at stoptheaclu.com ...
Problem is, Libs have no other standard then the acquisition of power, whatever promises are broken along the way do not matter a single iota..
This is beautiful.
This guy is going to start burning the asses of the radical lunatics that got him into the White House. That iceberg up ahead is reality and from now on it’s all about re-election.
For now though I will still state that these detainees will wind up in our neighborhoods.
Well, that’s what the buying frenzy for ammo and firearms was for. Reminds me of that old Chuck Norris movie “Invasion U.S.A.” about Islamists who stupidly invade America when Chuck’s armed..
Ask yourself the realistic scenario for things.
Obama has to appoint some team to come up with the new Gitmo policy. Rather than come up with one place to send them...it’ll likely be a minimum of three locations. So more manpower...more issues...more conflict. Then comes the announcement of the three locations. You can suspect that Charleston will likely be one of the three (my humble bet). The locals are going to be upset...so their congressmen and senators are going to be immediately negative about this entire deal. There could be lawsuits conducted to hinder or stop the move to the three locations. Then we will have the discussion over “rights”...and this will erode into various discussions with no one really sure of nothing. As soon as Gitmo boys are moved into the US...their lawyers will indicate that they had better living conditions, better food, better cells, better everything...back in Gitmo. Even Keith Olbermann of MSNBC will eventually say that Gitmo was paradise compared to the new locations. Finally...at some federal prison...not a military-run place...several of the Gitmo guys will be attacked and harmed. Obama will stand there and ask how he can fix all of these problems...and the response will be that someone knows a quiet Caribbean island where they could house prisoners like this with few complaints. You know what island we are talking about.
Nothing beautiful about it until congressional Republicans have the chance to congratulate President Obama on his admission that his predecessor was right all along. That hasn’t happened yet.
Thank you, I added this to the original post.
You are welcome.
The only hope I have that this won’t be as complete a total disaster as we all fear is that he was catering to the liberals and he will not be that far left as President but then I also hope every year the Cubs win the world series and see where that’s got me.
This is because Gitmo was used by the Clinton administration to detain refugees from Haiti as well as Cuba, refugees that they did not want to come to the US. It was a hellhole then and a legal limbo kind of a place. The Bush administration, it is amazingly inarticulate way, never stressed this point... they were simply doing what Clinton had done on a bigger, more WOT scale.
Bush shot himself in the foot every day he was in office because he simply could not explain or communicate clearly what he was doing. It is the nightmare of his legacy.
Obama probably just did his research and betcha he uses Clinton’s name to get out of the problem of Gitmo. Clinton had a special relation to Cuban refugees because during the Mariel thing, a lot of Cubans were sent to Arkansas by Jimmy Carter in detainment camps. This is my hazy recollection of facts about Gitmo. Though they did build a special prison for WOT detainees after 9/11. I recall Rumsfield couldn’t explain his way out of a paper bag either, though he was clearly acting on Clinton’s precedent.
Boy, IreneE: exactly right. It was Bush’s inarticulateness that done him in, in the end. I saw Condi Rice on C-Span the other day. What a brilliant and thoughtful spokesperson. She should have been front and center weekly speaking out on Bush policies. V’s wife.
Why don’t we ask Bill Ayers if they can stay at HIS house?! They have so much in common, after all!
Human with head out of posterior: "No, Mr. President, they are at war, not a crime scene."
President 0bama: "Well, I guess we have to release them and put the soldiers on trial for unlawful detention of a suspect."
Greg Craig: "I'll get right on that."
Two weeks later...
President 0bama: How are the new procedures for handling suspects arrested in Afghanistan working out.
Defense Secretary Clark: "Strange, seems our forces have stopped taking prisoners entirely. Also, enemy KIA numbers are soaring.
President 0bama: Well, as long as their not being unlawfully detained.....
Barack HuSAME Obama.
Or does that only pertain to Republicans? /s
There is no way that any Guantanamo prisoner can be given a criminal trial in a US court.
Why?
None of them has ever been read their freakin’ Miranda rights.
Every case can be tossed out on that basis alone, along with dozens of other procedural steps not followed that are required to bring criminals to trial, but have no bearing on apprehending foreign nationals in a war zone.
And then the Supremes got involved with their idiotic Boumedienne decision, saying that all these clowns are entitled to habeas corpus in a US civilian court.
This issue just burns me up to no end.
The silly people who voted for Obama have put their very own lives in danger, if these terrorists are set free.
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