Posted on 11/05/2008 11:50:42 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
As a senator and candidate, Mr. Obama voted and campaigned against some of the Bush administration's most aggressive surveillance, detention and interrogation policies, including the secret prison network run by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Obama administration will "take an immediate interest in what's actually going on there," said Prof. Laurence Tribe, who once taught Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School and now is among his legal advisers. "I'm certain that a rather bright light would be turned to Guantanamo right away."
Still, closing the offshore prison -- as Mr. Obama pledged to do -- will require a series of decisions on vexing issues such as the prisoners who have been approved for release, but whom no other country is willing to accept. ....
Mr. Obama has also supported increased oversight of the secret CIA detention program and efforts to restrict the CIA to interrogation techniques used by the military, which would prohibit waterboarding.
When it comes to domestic security, Mr. Obama has said he would end the Bush administration's preference for conducting surveillance outside of court oversight. He said he would ask his attorney general to conduct a comprehensive review of domestic surveillance and would appoint a senior adviser for domestic intelligence. ....
The American Civil Liberties Union has already assembled a proposal urging Mr. Obama to issue three executive orders on his first day on the job. The orders would close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, "cease and prohibit the use of torture and abuse" in CIA interrogations, and end the practice of sending detainees to countries that conduct harsher interrogations than are allowable under U.S. law.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
None of those people tried to push defeat over victory.
They all want to close Guantanamo. Yesterday, if possible.
I disagree with your primary assertion in your first paragraph, so the rest of your post is moot.
Interesting. You used the British (M.E.) spelling of ‘ingrain’. ‘Engrain’ as a verb became ‘ingrain’ as a verb in America around 1770.
That’s why I asked. Your opinions and concerns seem to be more Euro-oriented than most around here.
Admiral Mike Mullen - Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
If they can get that Afghan prison built, they can dump the real bad guys there and figure out where the rest of them can best be babysat.
Maybe Kenya? Just a thought.
Actually, the Ethiopians would do a good job. Send the so-so ones to Ethiopia, bad guys to Afghan prison.
That’s my solution.
Thanks. I know who Mullen is. I watched his senate confirmation. I think he’s a good man and I would defer to his opinion, although I personally don’t give a damn what the world thinks about Gitmo. The people of the world weren’t in NYC on 9/11, and their boys haven’t been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least nowhere near the levels that ours have, even though we protect many of the participating countries via NATO.
One hundred and eighty miles southeast of Denver is a place so desolate and barren that it defies photography. There is nothing to take a picture of except a little scrub and the endless horizon. This is the high plains of Eastern Colorado. The early explorers knew it as the Great American Desert. As you walk out across the dusty, barren landscape you drop down into a little valley and into the vegetation along a nondescript creek that some have called the Big Sandy. Rarely will you see any other person and there are few signs that anyone has ever been here. Yet in the evening stillness there is a feeling that something happened here, something big, something terrible, something capable of shaking the conscience of the greatest nation in the history of the world to its core and influencing its self image and the perception of the world for centuries. Most now know this place as Sand Creek.
In 1864 while the young states to the east had been engaged in a titanic struggle to determine its survival as a nation, the west was fighting a more basic war, a war of individual survival. It was a war against a phantom, a phantom who appeared suddenly, struck savagely and faded silently back into the nothingness from whence they came. Sand Creek, and a thousand other places was from whence they came. A century and a half ago the landscape looked much the same as it does now. Two things seem constant here, the wind and the landscape. This was a tiny dot, the creek a squiggle on a map of the vast expanse between Americans and where they wanted to be. This had been American territory since 1804, the southern horizon had been Mexican less than two decades earlier. This was the unknown, the unwanted, the home to the Indians of the plains.....The Phantom.
Just two years before this phantom had devoured maybe 800, possibly up to 2,000 souls in Minnesota in a bloody rage of unspeakable violence. Women raped again and again and again...., children nailed Christ-like to the walls of their homes to die there in agony, old men falling in pitiful defense or forced to watch, helpless, the knowing desecration of all they held holy, their families murdered one by one until at last it was their turn. Bodies found clustered in groups of a last desperate defense or strung along the paths of flight, bludgeoned by weapons of a past age, all of them stripped naked, and mutilated in ways only the most primitive, savage mind could understand. Blood and suffering and outrage, in Colorado in 1864 the tales still filtered in.
In the months since the Minnesota uprising, the contagion had spread. With the protective shield of young soldiers gone to a bigger war, the Indians rose. In this conflagration Denver was cut off from the rest of the country. No traveler dared attempt the passage, the Army turned the foolhardy back at the Kansas border. There was safety only in numbers. Travelers caught alone or in small parties or settlers caught unprepared in homes were subjected to brutalities so grotesque and pains so intense that the last reprieve was death. Death by torture, by fire, by disembowelment, by the methodical placement of arrows in non vital areas until they died writhing in agony. Death, blessed death, the end of the suffering. And then the scalping and mutilation. The last indignity, the desecration of the body, and the hair cut and ripped from the head to be stretched and tanned as a barbaric trophy. Each day new stories of unspeakable butchery filtered through the streets of Denver. Some were the same stories retold to the point of indistinguishability, some were of whole cloth but most bore the grim detail of truth
The highways of the day, the Platte, the Arkansas, the Overland trail, became pathways of carnage. In Texas the frontier rolled back 200 miles as one by one the outlying ranches fell, the dusty roads filled with panicked refugees who watched the surrounding hills for signs of the phantom which had visited their neighbors leaving the women defiled, the children butchered or enslaved and the men mutilated, tortured and murdered.
In Colorado the eastern slope ran red with blood. There were raids up to within a score of miles of Denver itself. Blood and bodies. Men and women... and children. Tiny corpses bloating in the Colorado sun or the unfortunates left living crawling to try to suckle at the cold breasts of mothers whose lifeless eyes stared at the sky, the horrors of their last mortal moments etched into the expressions of their death masks.
In the winter of 1864 General Sherman was marching and slashing and burning his way across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah to culminate a war whose toll on the young nation would be unfathomable. Six hundred thousand young American boys, the bloom of the Republic and the future of the country lay dead. But that was a gentleman's war. U. S. Grant, Robert E. Lee and each of the 600,000 gone had fought with honor and pride.
At the same time as General Sherman was rolling inevitably through the Southern countryside a ragtag group of Colorado volunteers and New Mexico militia left Denver in pursuit of the phantom. To end their torment, the men of Colorado – miners, drunks, outlaws, shopkeepers, bartenders, officials, derelicts, fortune-seekers – marched out onto the endless nothingness of the plains which hid their bloody and merciless phantom. On the banks of the Big Sandy they found their monster. Four trails, in the foot deep snow a mark of young vigorous warriors, led in from the West. The path of the renegades.
At dawn they engaged. They swept through the camp with the certitude of the Lord's vengeance. And the camp fought back. Men fought, women fought, the older children fought but it was a slaughter. After six hours somewhere around 160 were dead in the snow. And then the madness loosed itself on the victors. In a blood orgy, the dead were defiled in much the same way as Indians mutilated their victims. Most were scalped, genitalia cut out, breasts sliced off, men dismembered, fetuses removed. The men of Denver became the ogres that they claimed to fight. And when it was over and when quiet returned, the same sun and moon which looked down on the pale naked remains of the white corpses now looked down on the darker shadows of the Indian bodies, now bloody and silent in the snow.
The little army marched back to Denver in triumph. The beast had been bearded where it lived. But then rumors began to swirl and an awful truth began to form. A nation awash in the blood of its own sons took notice and rose in outrage. No comparatives, no justifications, no excuses could quell the revulsion. A Christian nation could not, would not, abide this savagery done in its name.
The Indian tribes also took notice. In a fury they struck and struck and struck again. Dozens died, then hundreds, then thousands. The westward movement shuddered, paused and then ground to a halt aghast at the panorama of terror and blood unfolding before them.
And the world saw. Shocked at the barbarity of those who shared the same hymnals, they recoiled in horror and formed images that no explanation could undo, images which would last for centuries. Who, here, were the savages?
The nation had wrestled with the Indian Question for nearly a century looking for a coherent and humane policy. The policy had been a mishmash of fits and starts and trials and errors and corrections and revisions but underlying it all was a inate sense of wanting to treat the Indians fairly and justly. But all the good intentions, the good works, the were washed away in the blood of innocents spreading red on the Colorado snow. The image of American with the Indians was set forever on that day. In the middle of nowhere, in three short hours on the lee side of battle, in a moment of misjudgement and anger and vengence.
In facing evil, they had become evil.
We are better than this. We are Americans.
Difficult Choices Await New President On Guantanamo, Intelligence Policies
Still, closing the offshore prison — as Mr. Obama pledged to do — will require a series of decisions on vexing issues such as the prisoners who have been approved for release, but whom no other country is willing to accept. ....
Not a problem for Obama and Pelosi.
Send ACORN down to sign them up as new registered Socialist voters and new citizens of the Democrat Socialist North America Union
So Obama voters, when some dirt bag terrorist that was recently plotting on how to blow you and your children up is living nect door to you. Thank your Messiah....
An entertaining post—but weak in analogy to today. You write as if your audience is uninformed as to events in the west. Sandy Creek? Where did the war council take place subsequent? What was the result?
Sure natives were abused, murdered, and treaty after treaty violated. They were also savages, scalping their own at regular intervals, not just whitey. Taking the lives of innocent on both sides.
World opinion is only a secondary issue—we must act in the best interest of our nation and for our survival. Making nice is sweet, but often unattainable—often just an appeasement and is crafted as part of the careful workings of our enemies.
The American Civil Liberties Union has already assembled a proposal urging Mr. Obama to issue three executive orders on his first day on the job. The orders would close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, “cease and prohibit the use of torture and abuse” in CIA interrogations, and end the practice of sending detainees to countries that conduct harsher interrogations than are allowable under U.S. law.
The American Communist and Lawyers Union protecting the rights of terrorist to slaughter Americans around the world and here at home.
Hey maybe if we get the unborn classified as terrorists these morons might try and save them...........
The point I was trying to make was that what those irregulars did was miniscule in comparison to what the Indians were doing and lesser yet in comparison to the carnage in the East. You could even half-way justify it.
It was abnormal but it is what most in the world and probably most in the United States believe our Indian Policy was. In the roughly 100 years of our Indian wars the military killed somewhere between a low estimate of 5,000 Indians and a high estimate of 20,000. 50 per year up to 200 per year. And most of those were from punative missions.
We did not slaughter Indians as a matter of policy and we did not defile the corpses yet that is the image that the world has, largely because of this one incident.
Laurence Tribe? Laurence Tribe is a legal adviser to Obama?
Dear God, help us.
Yes that Laurence Tribe, a man who believes the US Constitution DOES NOT give you a right to own and carry a personnel weapon.
Sorry but God isn’t going to help us right now as most Americans have turned their backs to him...................
The point I get from your story is that the truth doesn’t matter to foreigners who are already predisposed to dislike us. We shouldn’t care what they think because they will hate us and demonize us no matter what. If we are doing something foreigners don’t like, then we are probably doing something right and should keep doing it.
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