Free Republic

An article with a sensational headline "Hardin jail tries for detainees from Gitmo," recently appeared in the Billings Montana Gazette. It provides a glimpse into some fundamental problems with big government solutions and the Obama agenda. Hardin, Montana is a city of 3,384 people and not enough jobs. The city council of Hardin voted unanimously to create 100 new high paying jobs for some of its citizens by getting into the prison business. The city fathers committed to a $27 million bond program to fund the construction of a medium security, 460-bed prison through its economic development agency, the Two...

Link only, per FR copyright and posting policy

White House says Holder will decide on prosecutions; Obama opposes special commission on Bush-era policies. BY WILL DUNHAM WASHINGTON, April 26 (Reuters) - Releasing classified memos showing whether harsh Bush-era interrogation methods yielded useful information from terrorism suspects is not necessary, Republican Senator John McCain said on Sunday in a public disagreement with former Vice President Dick Cheney. After President Barack Obama released four memos this month revealing the Bush administration's legal justification for methods such as waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning -- Cheney called for declassifying any memos showing that these techniques succeeded in producing valuable information....

WASHINGTON -- It's more than just a tough sell for Attorney General Eric Holder this week to persuade European allies to accept Guantanamo detainees. "It's a 'mission impossible' for him, I think," one German analyst said ahead of Holder's arrival in London on Sunday. President Obama has set a goal of closing the U.S. military detention facility in Cuba by this coming January, and his administration is edging toward taking some prisoners to the U.S., most likely to Virginia. They are Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs. Their supporters claim say they never should have been at Guantanamo in the first...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leading Democratic senator said Sunday independent investigators should determine whether Bush administration officials ought to face charges over the harsh interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists. The White House had hoped to put the matter behind it by letting the attorney general make that call. Other liberal Democratic lawmakers appearing on the Sunday news shows joined Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., in pressuring the Obama administration to pursue investigations into the interrogations policies. But they stopped short of demanding charges against the Bush-era lawyers and other officials who devised the policies that critics have denounced as torture....

Arizona Sen. John McCain suggested today that the push to investigate and possibly prosecute Bush administration officials who crafted the legal basis for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," such as waterboarding, may have grown from a desire to "settle old political scores." Appearing on CBS' Face The Nation Sunday, the former Republican presidential nominee, who was himself tortured as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, said, "Are you going to prosecute people for giving bad legal advice?" He suggested that Washington should ignore calls to investigate who was behind government lawyers writing memos which gave legal cover to the...

Manfred Nowak, who serves as a U.N. specialist on torture, said that now that the Obama Administration has released documents admitting that the U.S. government tortured prisoners held at Gitmo, it is obligated under the U.N. Convention against Torture to follow through with prosecution of those complicit in these war crimes. “All who knew of the torture had both the moral and legal responsibility to take action against it,” Nowak said. “This includes not only those who carried out the heinous acts of torment, but also everyone in the chain of authority. President Bush, as the head-of-state most assuredly would...

(Washington, D.C., 4/25/09) The Obama administration today unveiled plans to construct a new, improved GITMO on the U.S. mainland to house the current detainees being held in Cuba. A administration spokesperson issued the following statement on condition of anonymity since the plans are currently secret and are not to be divulged (More details to be released by the NYTimes in an extensive expose' to be run next week): "President Obama is holding true to his word to close GITMO and move the detainees to the U.S. mainland. The search has been underway for a new location in the United States,...

First President Obama pledges up to $20 million dollars to help Hamas loving Gazans resettle in America. Now he is getting ready to release seven Chinese Muslims who are being held at Gitmo onto our streets. Please keep in mind that these Muslims have admitted to attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.

Reporting from Washington -- The Obama administration is preparing to admit into the United States as many as seven Chinese Muslims who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in the first release of any of the detainees into this country, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Economic development officials in Hardin are looking at the soon-to-close detention facility in Guantanamo Bay as a possible fix for the jail sitting empty in Hardin. President Barack Obama signed an executive order Jan. 22 to close the Guantanamo detention facilities in Cuba where hundreds of enemy combatants have been held since 2002. The closure is to occur in a year, during which time remaining detainees must be returned to their home countries or detained elsewhere. Meanwhile, a 460-bed detention facility sits empty in Hardin. Built by Two Rivers Authority, the city's economic development arm, the facility was meant to...

Helen Thomas: Why is the president blocking habeas corpus from prisoners at Bagram? I thought he taught constitutional law. And these prisoners have been there... Robert Gibbs: You're incorrect that he taught on constitutional law. You know we live in interesting times when Helen Thomas is going after Barack Obama. Miss Thomas was asking the White House press secretary last week why detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should not have the same right to challenge their detention in federal court that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush gave to Guantanamo's detainees. All Mr. Gibbs could...

SAN'A, Yemen—The two young sons of a Yemeni detainee at Guantanamo died when a grenade they were playing with accidentally detonated inside their home, a human rights lawyer and the detainee's brother said Thursday. The two boys were the sons of Guantanamo prisoner #1463, Abdelsalam al-Hilah, a businessman who was captured in Cairo in 2002 and sent to Guantanamo on charges of terrorism, said Ahmed Irman of the Hood Organization for Defending Human Rights, an organization that advocates for Guantanamo detainees in Yemen. The children, Youssef, 11, and Omar, 10, were playing unsupervised with the grenade in a room in...

Jeb Babbin reports that "White House lawyers are refusing to accept the findings of an inter-agency committee that the Uighur Chinese Muslims held at Guantanamo Bay are too dangerous to release inside the U.S." After President Obama promised to close Gitmo, the White House ordered an inter-agency review of the status of all the detainees. Apparently, it believed that many of those held would be quickly determined releasable. If so, this belief was perhaps naive, considering that a large percentage of the detainees, presumably the comparatively "innocuous" ones, had already been released (some of whom promptly returned to their terrorist...

Shep Smith gets all worked up about "torture" in this conversation on Fox News' webcast. "America does not f***ing torture," he yells. I think we can all agree on that, Shep. The issue is how we define torture. Of course, that may be meaningless to good ol' Shep... who has been rumored to complain that he is being "tortured" when his pancake makeup starts itching his face. Shrewd contractual negotiation strategy or just a simple political outburst by the Fox anchor? We'll report. You decide.

Sen. John McCain warned that a pursuit for charges against Bush administration officials who helped design harsh interrogation tactics used on terrorist suspects would turn into a "witch hunt." Speaking on CBS' The Early Show, the former Vietnam POW and Republican opponent of President Barack Obama in the 2008 election, said there is no evidence that he knows of that shows the officials who approved the tactics weren't giving plausible legal advice. This will have a "chilling effect on legal counsel," McCain said. McCain, who was himself tortured as a U.S. soldier by his North Vietnamese captors, was a vocal...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico—President Barack Obama came under fire Tuesday for including $80 million to close Guantanamo in a massive funding request to fight America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The $83.4 billion request to Congress was submitted on April 9, when lawmakers were on break over the Easter holidays. Tucked into the 99-page bill were a few paragraphs about Guantanamo—including a request for funds for foreign countries that accept prisoners. U.S. efforts to have other countries take in detainees have largely been a flop—stoking fears the men will end up in America. "The administration needs to tell the American...

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled... IN GENERAL - That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

At a town hall meeting in Wayne, Pa.,in June 2008,then Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., embraced an issue hardly made for his own TV ads: the rights of detainees accused of terrorism. "I think we should make it an issue," Obama said, referring to the 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Boumediene et al v Bush "that said we are going to live up to our ideals when it comes to rule of law. Basically what it said was those prisoners that we hold in Guantanamo deserve to be able to go before a court and say, “It wasn’t me” or...

After Obama’s promise to close Gitmo, the White House ordered an inter-agency review of the status of all the detainees, apparently believing that many of those held would be quickly determined releasable. The committee -- comprised of all the national security agencies -- was tasked to start with what the Obama administration believed to be the easiest case: that of the seventeen Uighurs, Chinese Muslims who were captured at an al-Queda training camp. The Uighurs sued for release under the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision, which gave Gitmo prisoners the Constitutional right to habeas corpus. Last October, a federal court ordered...