You can preventively detain MY TAINT indefinitely, you fuckers.

[Cainad (dec.)]

"We are going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country," Obama said. "But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States."

The idea is that some people can't be prosecuted for anything, but they still seem like dangerous or shady characters, so we'd better keep them locked up. Of course, with the planned closing of Guantanamo Bay, no one will know where any of these people are being kept.

Of course, as defenders of the president's idea will remind you, no one ever said anything about applying this policy to future detainees.

Ha. Ha. Ha.
Funny.

Mr. President knows how the law works, and so should you. There's this little thing called "precedent," and in this case it basically means that if no one in power stomps on this idea and calls it out for what it is, it essentially becomes accepted practice. That means the USA will have accepted that it's okay for the government to detain someone for as long as they feel like, without trial, for no reason other than that they suspect the person might maybe possibly be dangerous. And they'll laugh at the poor sucker if he dares suggest that he's entitled to something silly and stupid like due process of law.

Once we, the people, let government have that power (and believe me, we will, being the simpering security-worshiping government kiss-ups we have become), do you really believe that they'll ever give it up?

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Not funny anymore.

If "indefinite preventive detention" doesn't make you spitting angry, then you'd better cancel your membership to the "I Like Freedom and Civilization" Club right about now.

At least the terrorists aren't pretending to be my friends and protectors. At least they're supposed to be my enemy. I'd rather be killed by an enemy than betrayed by my government under the pretense of protecting me.

[LMNO]

At the same time, it's also a legal matter.

See, when the Bush crew fucked up and tortured people they knew were bad and had proof, all that evidence would have to be thrown out in a US court of law; so if they put them on trial, we would legally be forced to let them go because of procedural matters, rather than evidence.

It would be a case of a muderer going free because he got beat up by evidence-tampering cops, even though it's obvious he's a murderer.  But writ large.


Obama is fucked no matter what happens.

[Cain]

Then let this be a very clear lesson as to why breaking the law in the pursuit of a perfect counter-terrorism strategy shouldn't be done.

I mean, who could have predicted judges would get pissed when someone breaks the law?

[LMNO]

If you want to get paranoid and conspiratorial, it was set up that way by the Bushies: They knew that as soon as they tortured terrorists, the next administration would be powerless to prosecute the terrorists without suffering major political losses.

[Jenne]

My point is that all this is fine and well, but...MAYBE THE MOTHERFUCKING OBAMA CAMP SHOULDA WOULDA COULDA FIGURED THAT SHIT OUT BEFORE THEY MADE ALL THE PROMISES, YO.

Because you can't tell me they didn't know.  OR didn't have the CHANCE or the wherewithall to know.  And instead, they campaigned on bullshit.

NOT that I expected that this campaign wouldn't end up letting us down, but for chrissakes, they coulda at LEAST given us like a year or so before it happened.  NOT within the first 100 days for jesusfuckingpogosticking sakes.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

At the same time, it's also a legal matter.

See, when the Bush crew fucked up and tortured people they knew were bad and had proof, all that evidence would have to be thrown out in a US court of law; so if they put them on trial, we would legally be forced to let them go because of procedural matters, rather than evidence.

It would be a case of a muderer going free because he got beat up by evidence-tampering cops, even though it's obvious he's a murderer.  But writ large.


Obama is fucked no matter what happens.

I think what he should do is to, at the same time as these people get let go on these technicalities, also officially pardon a bunch of people who have been incarcerated for being deranged vigilantes. After that the problem should solve itself.

[Prelate Diogenes Shandor]

Mr. President knows how the law works, and so should you. There's this little thing called "precedent," and in this case it basically means that if no one in power stomps on this idea and calls it out for what it is, it essentially becomes accepted practice. That means the USA will have accepted that it's okay for the government to detain someone for as long as they feel like, without trial, for no reason other than that they suspect the person might maybe possibly be dangerous. And they'll laugh at the poor sucker if he dares suggest that he's entitled to something silly and stupid like due process of law.

Once we, the people, let government have that power (and believe me, we will, being the simpering security-worshiping government kiss-ups we have become), do you really believe that they'll ever give it up?

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Not funny anymore.

If "indefinite preventive detention" doesn't make you spitting angry, then you'd better cancel your membership to the "I Like Freedom and Civilization" Club right about now.

At least the terrorists aren't pretending to be my friends and protectors. At least they're supposed to be my enemy. I'd rather be killed by an enemy than betrayed by my government under the pretense of protecting me.

Damnit! I knew he was gonna turn out to be full of shit. It was the fact that people were treating him like he was the messiah or something around the time of his inaguration that tipped me off. Nobody is that goddamn perfect!

[fomenter]

Damnit! I knew he was gonna turn out to be full of shit. It was the fact that people were treating him like he was the messiah or something around the time of his inaguration that tipped me off. Nobody is that goddamn perfect!

it must be nice to have untarnished youthful optimism, i was tipped of when -- HE WAS A POLITICIAN, and the other big clue for me was he was -- A CHICAGO POLITICIAN......

but age will do that to you, forgive my cynical old heart

[Cain]

I wondered about that.  Most reports suggested it was Poland or the Czech republic or possibly Romania which had those camps.  And because of Rumsfeld mouthing off about old versus new Europe and the desire of the new NATO inductees to prove their worth, it kind of made sense.

But then you remember these were the very same nations who had similar practices done by the Soviet Union and their own Communist leaders.  And that they still hate Russia in particular for it.  And then you remember the UK has great and remote little areas like the Scottish highlands, where they have trained special forces and intelligence services since before WWII, and that Britain, unlike eastern Europe, doesn't have a long history of dictatorial and insane rulers (Maggie Thatcher aside) but DOES have a history of coming up with inventive, cruel and certainly heinous punishment for uppity brown people.  And a much longer standing and closer intelligence relationship with the USA than most Eastern European states.  Also, we know for a fact that Diego Garcia (that island where we kicked out the natives for the express purposes of leasing the real estate to the United States military, and to this day deny them the right to return to their homes) has been used for such purposes before now.

[Jenne]

Apparently, Albania is taking some released Gitmo prisoners.  Interesting turn of events.  Wonder how much $ is being thrown at them to do so.

[Cain]

Wait, is there someone in particular in the Balkans we want dead at the moment?

Albania and therefore Kosovo is Islamic terrorism central in Europe, and their intelligence was complicit in funnelling arms and people from Middle Eatern conflict zones to take part in the Yugoslav secessionist wars.  I can imagine them offering, but I don't know why Obama would accept, unless no-one else at all is offering or domestic pressure is really that high (and I find it hard to imagine it is).

[Jenne]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6189517.stm  Apparently, they've been sent there for over a year now.  This article is about a year and a half old.

[Cain]

Matt Taibbi, the last journalist in America, ranted forth the night before last:

The recent haggling over Guantanamo Bay is such classic Democratic Party politics, it almost makes you want to laugh. Almost, except that it's, you know, revolting. Eight years of Clintonian squirming was bad enough, but now we have Barack Obama, smoking Habeas Corpus and not inhaling it.

Why is the Gitmo decision classic Democratic Party thinking? Because when certain of us said we wanted Gitmo closed, we sort of meant a change in policy - we didn't mean just physically closing the plant, moving the prisoners elsewhere, and leaving the policies essentially unchanged. This is what this generation of Democrats does every time: every time they come to a fork in the road, they try to take it.

There's always some sort of semantic twist involved with their policies, an asterisk, some kind of leprechaun trick to get around doing the simple right thing. They're all for gay rights, and then once the lights come on, they've basically codified the closet by ushering in Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

They campaign against the war in Iraq, promise to get us out, and say they were against it all along — and then once they get in power, they start using words like eventually and in 4-6 years and once the situation stabilizes. Later it turns out that what they meant by being against the war all along was their conviction that we should have invaded on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, or some such bullshit.

Now there's this Gitmo business. This, folks, just isn't that tough a call. The prison (and the much less publicized archipelago of hard sites in foreign countries where more terror suspects are held) was a symbol of everything wrong and stupid about the Bush administration. Snatching people up by force and dumping them in rocks on the middle of the ocean without due process is the kind of thing that was last done by "civilized" cultures back in the days of the Roman Empire; since then it's been the exclusive province of sociopathic third-world dictators like Stalin and Mobutu Sese Seko. It was absolutely imperative, from a public relations standpoint if nothing else, that Obama immediately repudiate these practices, design some kind of due process to deal with the already incarcerated prisoners, and show the world that what happened during the Bush years was an insane aberration, a result of our having accidentally elected an emotionally retarded sadist to the White House.

Instead, Obama is on his way to doing exactly the wrong thing. He's going to make a show of closing the base, but retain the underlying idea by keeping some of the prisoners in indefinite legal purgatory. In some ways this is worse than what Bush did, because Bush at least took a clear stand — he was nuts and thought this was the right thing to do. No matter how you look at Obama's decision, it's weighed somewhere along the line by political calculation. Either he thinks indefinite decision is right and he's bowing to public appeals by closing the base, or else he thinks it's wrong and is bowing to opposition outcry by maintaining the old policy.

It's one thing to change your mind or play both sides of the fence on matters that don't involve human lives, on theoretical/hypothetical campaign issues, but another thing to do it with actual incarcerated human beings as the key variable in the political equation.

I still like Obama, in a lot of ways. Having a president with less ability to inspire public confidence at a time like this, with our economy in such a death spiral, would be a disaster; God knows where we'd be right now with a McCain or a Mike Huckabee at the helm. But this guy has to show some stones somewhere along the line. He has to just forget the DC game and just take a clear stand on an issue like this sometime. He's kind of running out of time to rescue his all-important first impression.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

It would be a case of a muderer going free because he got beat up by evidence-tampering cops, even though it's obvious he's a murderer.  But writ large.

That is precisely what is supposed to happen under our legal system.

[LMNO]

It would be a case of a muderer going free because he got beat up by evidence-tampering cops, even though it's obvious he's a murderer.  But writ large.

That is precisely what is supposed to happen under our legal system.

Yup.  But since Obama is, after all, a politician (and a Smiler, at that), he doesn't want to risk the political implications of following the legal system, as he should.

If you want to get paranoid and conspiratorial, it was set up that way by the Bushies: They knew that as soon as they tortured terrorists, the next administration would be powerless to prosecute the terrorists without suffering major political losses.