OOOO! OOOOOO! Dick Cheney is offended! How dare those nasty bullies at Amnesty International suggest that The USA might be guilty of human rights violations at that plush resort so fondly known as Gitmo?
Not that Dear Dick is letting such things bother him:
Nope, nothing to see there, move along, no harm, no foul, and those pesky stories about abuses? Just malicious twaddle from troublemakers.
I would dearly love to see Our Dickie spend a year or two in Gitmo, being treated just like all the other happy guests – I’m sure he’d find it remarkably refreshing.
Well, yes. But…people still inside probably find it difficult to find an outlet for their complaints, and they’re not likely to make complaints on the plane. And, besides “their home country”, where else does Cheney expect them to go upon release? Uruguay? Mallorca?
It’s interesting to me how Cheney, with an eye on the American audience, implicitly sets up this contrast between the solid values and home-spun truth of the US and the dodgy values of others (“their” - as opposed to “our”), who are immersed in webs of deception and thus constitute a threat to “the free world”.
I can smell the spin doctors behind this discourse.
Still, it is interesting to consider that they guy really believes what he is saying. He is not lying, he is not kidding. How the heck can that be?
Well, he is the sort I guess who does not admit mistakes. Further, he has a lot of self-confidence. Further in his life he has often been attacked by real enemies. This means that when he is attacked on factual grounds, he is spring-loaded in the denial mode.
Even more alarming is that I bet a bunch of other Americans are thinking the same way as the Veep.
How about fucking disgustingly fucking infuriatingly fucking nauseating fucking contempt from a fucktard fucking fuckwad “I had other priorities” fucking chickenhawk fucking soulless fucking MONSTER???
FUCK FUCK FUCK HIM WITH PUSTULE-CRUSTED RHINO CARCASSES
:: deep breath ::
Okay, I’m sorry, I really try not to let those fuckers get to me, but this time…
Dick Cheney is the Worst President we’ve ever had. Frankly, and seriously.
Can someone explain to me why we have a holding site for military prisoners in a country (Cuba) that we ignore as a legitimate Western country? It really is mind boggling. Why weren’t those prisoners brought onto US territory?
“For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously,” [Cheney] said in an interview that was to air Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”
My God, is there anyone out there who actually still believes that the US is NOT a violator of human rights? If so, it’s really long past the time to take off the rose-colored glasses, wake up and smell the coffee, and… well, you get my drift.
PS Amnesty International “suggested” no such thing, Big Time Dick. They flat-out stated it.
Just to nitpick, Guantanamo Bay IS US territory, the same as an embassy in any other country. It’s a holdover from before Castro and we’ve maintained it for political rather than military reasons, basically to be a pain in Castro’s backside.
The reason the detainees are not here is obvious. Who wants them in the United States? It’s like deciding where to put a landfill. Nobody wants garbage anywhere near them. After 9/11 nobody wanted terrorists anywhere near them, so Gitmo became the default. That a good number of them have turned out to be innocent doesn’t change the fact that we are holding some real scumbags down there, and I have no real problem with that.
Really? You really believe that’s the reason they’re keeping them in Gitmo rather than Leavenworth? So as not to sully our precious American mainland soil with terrorist scum leavings?
Might it not be more likely that they’re keeping them there because it’s remote? Because maybe they want to do things to them that they’d rather not have reporters and lawyers seeing or hearing and the best way to do that is never to actually bring them into this country in the first place?
Airman,
I git the Gitmo of that, but still wonder; after Sept 11, wouldn’t it have been better to ,um, “showcase” our absolute terrorist captives in US facilities, to show that the Job is being done? I would think that that would be a military statement.
To house them in an offsite makes me wonder about motives, that are now being confirmed. The US , I hope, should be an example of transparent Democracy. This is an example of secrecy and means not tolerated within our borders.
OK, we don’t want terrorists “near us”, but if we’re going to be the World’s Police, we should have an adequate means of proper democratic treatment within our territory.
Gitmo is on lease from the Cuban gov’t, I’m fairly certain that Cuba retains sovreignty, at least on paper.
Do you really think that? The U.S. could easily put them out on a military base in the SW US and I doubt anyone would complain. They are in Gitmo because that is outside of the juristiction of most US courts and because as of 2001 the Courts had ruled that folks detained in Gitmo didn’t have the same rights to appeal to the US justice system that folks detained in the US had.
My understanding is that one particular advantage for Gitmo lay in its being more or less “extra territorial”, that is, the detainees could be held in a place under military control without being under any Federal jurisdiction, where activist judges might cite inconvenient documents.
Don’t you think possibly there might have been an inkling in some minds that keeping these people off US soil would prevent habeas claims being brought? I mean, if your intention is to keep people incarcerated without trial for long periods, then wouldn’t that be helpful? Not that it worked fully, but they fought pretty damn hard to prevent such claims.
It’s a good thing we, as a country, don’t believe in justice for all then. Otherwise the whole “imprisoning innocent people for an indeterminate length of time” thing would cause some major dissonance.
Who has determined that they are garbage? Which ones have been charged, tried and convicted of terrorism? Which ones have actually been allowed representation in a hearing other than with military attorneys (despite the influx of civil attorneys)?
Even German POWs were housed all over the USA. Surely each state prison could handle ten men. But then they couldn’t be “processed” in quite the same way. (And we don’t really imprison people without trial in America do we? That’s unConstitutional.)