Un-American by Any Name (Barf Alert!)

How many toilets could Amnesty's bullsh*t report clog up?

Those prisoners with no charges...

The Times sinks further into delusional irrelevance.

There is a war on. These jaybirds will be held until the war is over, or until someone decides they are no longer a threat.

If, as the administration says, some of these prisoners are active, dangerous members of a conspiracy to commit terrorism against the United States, there must be legitimate charges to file against them.

No, it doesn't work that way. War is war. They are not accused of any crime. German soldiers in World War 2 were not accused of any crime, they were simply held until the war was over and they were judged to be no longer a threat to the US. Military action is not an extension of the civilian courts, war is the area that exists when law is insufficient to the threat.

Enemy operatives, during war, are not subpoenaed, they aren't served with legal papers, they aren't read their rights, there is no warrant. Men with guns will be sent, and the man judged to be a threat will be killed, along with anyone unfortunate to be standing anywhere near him when it comes. If he should be so fortunate as to survive, and is captured instead, he will be held in captivity until he is judged no longer a threat. If he is judged to be a threat even in captivity, he will be put up against a wall and shot. And thats the end of it, there is no appeal.

How many toilets could Amnesty's bullsh*t report clog up?
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About as many as the communists in the ACLU could clog up!!!

if you capture enemy combatants on the battlefield, why would you have to charge them with a crime?

And freshly re-elected Sen. Arlen will certainly give a boost to the NY Times/Amnesty International arguement.

if you capture enemy combatants on the battlefield, why would you have to charge them with a crime?

The strategy of the left is to force the EC's into the "justice" system where the ACLU and associated lefty groups can raise all manner of mischief.

The hateful anti-American left is again falling in the insane delusion that manufacturing lies by attacking the our President and the military and by defending the terrorists is going to hurt President Bush and sway the public opinion to their side. These idiots tried Abu Ghraib over blown story hundred of times in 2004 and they failed miserably to defeat President Bush. And this time they are going to utterly fail again and again and again.

Doing the same things and expecting different results is the definition of insanity (stupidity)- Albert Einstein.

This is war, not a shoplifting charge.

>>>...has nothing in common with any American notions of justice or the rule of law.<<<

The people (streching the term) held in Guantanamo are not subject to American notions of justice or the rule of law.

They belong to no country - least of all America. They are not soldiers for they wear no uniform or insignia to identify them with any cause. They kill innocent civilians and military without distinction.

They deserve the same "justice" as a mad dog.....a bullet to the head.

In that context, Guantamimo is a vast and unwise overreaction to grant civil rights where none should exist.

They belong to no country - least of all America.

They deserve the same "justice" as a mad dog.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=16107_New_York_Times-_Shut_Down_Guantanamo&only

The New York Times defends Amnesty International’s comparison of Guantanamo Bay (where 600 unlawful combatants are held) with the Soviet Gulag (where more than 20 million innocent Russian citizens were imprisoned, and millions killed): Un-American by Any Name.

As a solution to this towering injustice, the editors of the Times call for Gitmo to be shut down. Immediately. Turn them all loose. And make sure the evil Bushco doesn’t send those poor oppressed killers without consciences to places where they might be imprisoned again—like their home countries.

If we do this, the world will start to love us again and we’ll be safe.

What Guantánamo exemplifies - harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse - may or may not bring to mind the Soviet Union's sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies.

Was the NY Times critical of the Soviet gulag before? Did they even acknowledge that it existed? Or have they discovered it just in time to smear the Bush administration?

BTW, anyone who has ever read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago knows that Guantánamo is nothing like the gulag. The comparison is asinine.

I'm so happy the N.Y. Times takes its own recommendations so seriously:

Preserving Our Readers' Trust

As a media watchdog, we believe self-examination by news organizations is always useful, so we welcomed the arrival of The New York Times' recent report, "Preserving Our Readers' Trust." Because a democracy cannot operate without an independent, critical, and responsible press, it is incumbent on news organizations to continually assess their own performance to see if they are fulfilling their obligations to the public. Nonetheless, we are concerned about some of the ideas expressed in the report, and we take issue with some aspects of the Times' reporting that the report does not address.

Because of its importance to the functioning of our political and social life, the press will always be subject to criticism and critique. It is the press' obligation to take such critiques seriously; doing so requires not only responding to legitimate criticism, but having the fortitude and integrity to reject baseless attacks designed only to serve a partisan agenda.

snip...snip...snip...

Full Report

NYT's Wayback Machine Takes Editorial Board To 9/10

The New York Times has an editorial for tomorrow's edition that argues for a return to the failed counterterrorism strategies that brought us the 9/11 attacks. Not only does the Gray Lady continue the fortnight-long harangue about Guantanamo Bay, but also insists that the only way to deal with terrorists is through law enforcement:

Now that the Bush administration has made clear how offended it is at Amnesty International's word choice in characterizing the Guantánamo Bay detention camp "the gulag of our times," we hope it will soon get around to dealing with the substantive problems that the Amnesty report is only the latest to identify. What Guantánamo exemplifies - harsh, indefinite detention without formal charges or legal recourse - may or may not bring to mind the Soviet Union's sprawling network of Stalinist penal colonies. It certainly has nothing in common with any American notions of justice or the rule of law.
Our colleague Thomas L. Friedman offered just the right solution a few days back. The best thing Washington can now do about this national shame is to shut it down. It is a propaganda gift to America's enemies; an embarrassment to our allies; a damaging repudiation of the American justice system; and a highly effective recruiting tool for Islamic radicals, including future terrorists.

This refrain sounds familiar. Unless I'm mistaken, the NYT also joined the chorus of voices who called for the US to raze Abu Ghraib prison to the ground after the discovery that a handful of idiots on the night watch had abused prisoners. Unfortunately, those critics forgot that the Iraqis actually owned Abu Ghraib, and didn't want it demolished. Now the editors want us to close Guantanamo -- and for what? Because the terrorists there complain about abusing a book, something that an investigation shows the detainees do more often than anything the guards do themselves.

The Times argues that Guantanamo should not be the only military detention facility shut down, either:

What makes Amnesty's gulag metaphor apt is that Guantánamo is merely one of a chain of shadowy detention camps that also includes Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the military prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and other, secret locations run by the intelligence agencies. Each has produced its own stories of abuse, torture and criminal homicide. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a tightly linked global detention system with no accountability in law. Prisoners have been transferred from camp to camp. So have commanding officers. And perhaps not coincidentally, so have specific methods of mistreatment.
Over more than two centuries of peace and war, the United States has developed a highly effective legal system that, while far from perfect, is rightly admired around the world. The shadowy parallel system that the Bush administration created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has by now proved its inferiority in almost every respect. It does not seem to have been effective in finding and prosecuting the most dangerous terrorists, and it has been a disaster in undermining America's reputation for fairness, just treatment of the guilty and humane treatment of the innocent.

The notion of relying on Amnesty International to supply a fair and impartial survey of any wrongdoing should have died with that idiotic and historically inept reference to Guantanamo as an American gulag. In any case, the US military doesn't answer to Amnesty International but to the elected leadership of the United States, which answers to its people. The military has performed investigations which have not only been supervised by the executive branch but also by Congress, and while some have been left unsatisfied by the results, the reports have shown that abuses have been isolated and the perpetrators punished when discovered.

What the Times argues is that terrorists captured out of uniform, bearing arms against US forces in a field of battle, and/or purposely conducting attacks on civilians should be arrested rather than captured and jailed rather than placed in detention camps. The Times evidently wants to return to the Clinton-era strategy of treating al-Qaeda like a criminal gang rather than a worldwide terror effort that has already proven catastrophically deadly to Americans at home and abroad.

The "shadowy parallel" system that our military uses is no different than any other POW or detention system used in other wars, except that in other wars, we would line unlawful combatants against the wall and have them shot rather than lock them up. Part of that is to gain as much intelligence from them as possible, but the other reason is the increase in delicate sensibilities of the media and the public. The Times wants these terrorists released, and not to their countries of origin -- where they also take a dim view of Islamofascist fanatics -- but to unsuspecting third countries where they can return to their terrorism without fear of prosecution.

And that's supposed to make people like America more?

Prisoners captured during war have never had access to American courts, no matter what the Times might argue about the "basic principles of justice that served America so well in the past". The Geneva Convention clearly states that unlawful combatants can be shot after capture and are only entitled to a military tribunal to determine their proper status. It doesn't require access to civilian court systems for good reasons -- unlawful combatants aren't criminals, they're enemies out of uniform, and they put civilian populations at unnecessary deadly risk.

What the Times and the crybaby Leftist establishment it represents refuse to accept is that America is at war -- a war it did not seek but a war that its enemies insisted on forcing on us. We tried the Times' strategy for more than a decade, and it resulted in stupid legalistic decisions to arrest AQ leadership rather than just killing them when we had the chance. Even arresting them was too controversial for the prior administration, which balked at a deal to capture Osama bin Laden in the mid-90s because of the lack of an indictment. That strategy led to 9/11 and the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans by the lunatics that the Times seeks to protect.

An editorial like this would have been clueless enough on 9/10. Less than four years after the bloody massacre that occurred the next day, it's pathetic and embarrassing, and a demonstration of moral cowardice.

-- Captain Ed, captainsquartersblog.com/mt/

NYT: Our colleague Thomas L. Friedman offered just the right solution a few days back. The best thing Washington can now do about this national shame is to shut it down. It is a propaganda gift to America's enemies; an embarrassment to our allies; a damaging repudiation of the American justice system; and a highly effective recruiting tool for Islamic radicals, including future terrorists.

Actually, I tend to agree with Friedman. We should close down Gitmo and turn over the detainees to the Northern Alliance for "storage" in its shipping container prisons where few survive if they don't talk. Then, we'll see how severe the conditions in their Caribbean retreat really were in comparison. What do you bet Friedman and the Times would be the first to whine, if Amnesty International didn't beat them to it.

I don't see why, once you get something like Guantanamo set up, the government couldn't put all sorts of people in it, including some of the people that are posting here, if there happened to be a change in the wind. I would rather see the power of the federal government pretty limited.

Frivolous even by Democratic standards, June 08, 2005

I just heard Nancy Pelosi make what may be the most foolish statement any public official has uttered in a long while. Pelosi called for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center in order to give us "a clean slate in the Muslim world." I argued here that Gitmo should not be closed. But the foolishness of Pelosi's comment resides not in the error of her substantive position, but rather in her fantasy of a "clean slate." While that concept may have some applicability in therapy, there is no such thing in international relations, as anyone who has studied history for five minutes knows. And the idea of a clean slate with Muslims, a group with whom the west has clashed for something like ten centuries, is particularly ludicrous. Some of the Muslims from whom Pelosi would like to receive a clean slate are still upset about the reconquest of Spain. And then there's the small matter of the existence of Israel.

Pelosi's comment also reveals the self-hating belief held by so many on the left that Muslim antagonism towards the U.S. is our fault. If only we would avoid stepping on the Koran, all would be well. Bill Clinton was also a "clean-slater," though he was too intelligent to put it that way. Clinton's foreign policy consisted largely of running around the world apologizing for past U.S. wrongs real and imagined, and trying to help Muslims in the Balkans and in territories occupied by Israel. But instead of a clean slate, Clinton bought us the rise of al Qaeda and ultimately 9/11.

Pelosi also fails to recognize that any brownie points we might conceivably gain by closing Gitmo would be lost the first time a Muslim (aided by the MSM and liberal Democrats like Pelosi) claimed that abuse was occurring at some other facility or locale. As I have said before, if Gitmo didn't exist, our enemies and critics would have to invent it, as they basically have.

On the morning of 9/11, this was a 50-50 nation politically. Since then, the Republicans have gained a clear upper hand. That's not because Americans are happy about what's happening in Iraq or overjoyed about our economy. It's because Americans realize that the Democratic party is not completely serious when it comes to fighting terrorism. Pelosi's comment shows that one of the party's leaders isn't serious at all.

-- Paul, powerlineblog.com/