Which is just another way of saying that this situation is entirely due to American cruelty and amorality. A nation where doing the right thing - any right thing - to solve this entirely self-inflicted problem is politically unthinkable.
Hang suspects without a trial? :rolleyes: I see your values aren’t improving with time.
If he’s telling the truth, it’s definitely a major violation of human rights (actually, it is even if he lies) :
Guy trying to make some money end up caught in a war zone. He flee to another country where, instead of being handed to his country consulate and sent back home, he’s detained arbitrarily and similarly arbitrarily handed to a third country that detains him without warrant, due process, access to a lawyer, etc… for 11 years. I fail to see how this wouldn’t qualify as many violations of human rights.
ETA : I think a good way to test whether or not something is acceptable is to wonder what you would think if it happened to, say, your brother (assuming that you like your relative and don’t have any reason to believe he’s a criminal, obviously).
There is an easy answer. If nobody wants them, you keep them. Free.
Congress currently won’t allow them to be kept in super high security prisons in the continental United States. Saying that they should be released into American society is not in any way a realistic proposal. You might as well suggest that they be given homes made of chocolate in Candyland: it isn’t going to happen, ever.
So, that Catch 22 leads us back to them staying for free in Guantanamo, which is also a bad alternative. But nobody has thought of a good, realistic alternative yet.
They probably should get the homes made of chocolate as a bonus too.
It is absolutely realistic. Stating that the USA don’t want that to happen doesn’t make it any less realistic. It just mean that the USA deny them their most basic human rights. “The congress won’t allow” isn’t better than “Kim Jong Un won’t allow”. It’s not something that must be accepted as a given, but something that must be actively denounced.
If I had written, when I joined this board : “twelve years down the road, the USA will detain people without trial or due process for indefinite period”, everybody would have shouted that such a thing could never happen (well…except maybe Der Trihs, assuming he was already a doper). That’s not a minor incident (like, say, a cop beating up a suspect), that’s a grievous attack against the core principles of our societies, and the fact that it happens with the blessing of the highest elected representatives of the people makes it even more serious.
I don’t think you can say that "suicides and hunger strikes " = “being mistreated” when applying it to the population of individuals held in Guantanamo. Your average person on the street - yes; them - no.
It appears to me that the assertion of the ACLU that force-feeding is universally regarded as torture is mistaken:
Even the best run prisons have suicide rates higher than the norm for outside prison. And I have seen no indications that any Qur’ans have been desecrated.
Cite.
I see nothing brutal or inhumane about searching a prisoner’s cell for contraband. I understand that the prisoners don’t want to be held, but the conditions under which they are being held do not appear to be either brutal or inhumane, and the allegation of the OP that “Gitmo is killing me” appears to be a wild exaggeration.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, most people know Gitmo is a grave injustice, on both left and right. The problem is there is no stomach for fixing it in anyway. The simple truth is most Americans do not care about a bunch of Muslims captured half a world away being locked in Cuba forever. That’s not right or correct, but I’m talking reality here. Even the Democrats, once Bush was gone, have mostly abandoned railing against Gitmo. Protests against Gitmo have decreased over time, not increased.
I don’t know how it all gets resolved, but saying we should give them free housing in the United States and as YogSosoth suggested let them sue us and collect huge judgments is just as Ravenman said a fantasy. It’s literally like saying let’s give them all yachts carved from crystal and filled with gold furniture, it just will not ever happen.
Yes, it DOES make it less realistic.
If the NRA proclaimed a universal right for humans to own fully automatic machine guns, they can protest all they want, but the French Parliament damn well isn’t going to pass a law allowing for the universal, unlicensed ownership of machine guns in France. The Parliament is just going to tell the NRA to stuff it.
Now, I happen to agree that “freedom from arbitrary detention” and “right to a speedy trial” are universal human rights, and that owning a machine gun is not. But yes, the fact that a government will never, ever allow something to happen IS the definition of something being unrealistic, no matter how strongly you feel about the issue.
I pretty much agree. But that doesn’t change the reality that the American people have elected representatives who would probably oppose the release of Guantanamo prisoners into the US on a near-unanimous basis. You have to deal with reality on reality’s terms, not invent solutions to a serious problem that don’t even pass the laugh test.
This is so obvious that I would add that Obama would probably be impeached within a matter of a couple weeks if he actually attempted to release any Guantanamo prisoners to roam around the US on their own free will.
I think our only hope long term is getting a few states where they came from to agree to take them back, and dispense with them as they see fit (give them trials under those country’s laws, release them etc.) But it’ll take basically us bribing several countries over in southwest Asia for this to happen, and right now there isn’t a lot of political will even for that.
As your cites say, it’s true that force-feeding has been approved for use a number of times, especially in the US. It’s also true that:
Those are just two that have come out against force-feeding at Gitmo – there are many other human rights groups opposed to it generally. But as you pointed out, some groups do think it’s ethical in certain circumstances. Cite. Cite.
Yes, it’s he-said she-said on a lot of issues at Guantanamo, because access to prisoners and certain areas of the prison is restricted to media outlets and organizations (even the Red Cross). The reports we do receive are either blatant propaganda, incomplete, or from the mouths of prisoners or prison officials. I choose to believe the prisoners, rather than the officials who have every reason to cover up mistreatment.
As for suicides: the Department of Defense re-named them “self-injurious behavior” at Gitmo, which rolls off the tongue much better. I can’t find comparisons between the suicide rate at Gitmo vs regular prisons, but I’m not sure that comparison would be useful anyway, because prisoners are being held for very different reasons, at a very unique facility.
If first-hand accounts, hunger strikes, suicides, and the opinions of human rights groups, the Red Cross, and the UN aren’t enough to convince you, I don’t know what will. If you’re waiting for confirmation from the prison or government that mistreatment is happening or rights are being violated – it’s not coming.
I think we let them go to whoever wants to take them into their homes. YogSosoth and clairobscur can have the first 2.
It’s kind of a catch-22, isn’t it? AFAICT, many of the groups opposed to force feeding think that prisoners should be allowed to starve themselves. So, if the US force feeds them, they are torturing prisoners. I don’t think it would be any better if the US allowed prisoners to starve themselves.
And the prisoners have every reason to exaggerate and/or misrepresent what is happening to them, as seems to have been the case in the Qur’an desecration allegations. I don’t think you can say that one side is more likely to be making stuff up than the other.
No more than an admission from the prisoners or their lawyers that they are exaggerating for effect.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m unsure of the legalities of this. Why can’t the President, as CiC of the military, make a decision on military prisoners? What I’m proposing is basically amnesty. We do it for political prisoners, hell, we’ve done it for years with Cubans floating their way to Florida. I don’t recall a Congressional hearing on that. I’m not saying you don’t have a point that Congress is going to be dicks about it and try to block it, I just never thought Congress had anything to do with granting amnesty.
I see the prisoners as political prisoners instead of POWs. We know so many of them are innocent. If the president wants to grant them a full pardon, I don’t see how Congress can stop him. Just do it on the last day of office. I do remember that whole deal with moving them to US-based prisons or closing Guantanamo, but that, I thought, was much different than simply granting a pardon.
Another question: Since Guantanamo is a US military base, could the President unilaterally cut off access to the base and basically build a little town for the prisoners there? They don’t have to be in prison after all. I’m assuming they could funnel money for regular maintenance secretly over there to take down the walls and the cells and buy them some amenities.
Are you not aware that Congress writes the laws on military detention, immigration, amnesty, and all related issues? Do you really think Presidents just make that shit up on the fly?
Congress has prohibited funding for construction of new facilities at Guantanamo.
There’s some confusion.
Firstly, a pardon is the ability of the president to basically nullify crimes. Meaning, a pardon can be a general amnesty in which all persons who committed a given Federal crime between x date and x date are forgiven and cannot be prosecuted. It is unlimited in scope, it can preemptively pardon all crimes or all persons who committed specific crimes or etc. Carter issued an amnesty for all persons who dodged the Vietnam draft, for example. Ford pardoned Nixon for any and all crimes he may have committed.
There is no recourse from the other branches, it’s one of the few unchecked powers of the Presidency.
It can also take the form of clemency, in which the President says someone’s sentence is cut short or ended entirely but their conviction remains. It can happen before, during, after a trial and even after someone has died.
But that just means that these prisoners have to be released from incarceration, that they can’t be charged for the Federal crimes in question, etc. It can require the Bureau of Prisons to release Federal inmates, for example.
So let’s say Obama pardons everyone of the 166 detainees still at Guantanamo, they’re still stranded there. A pardon doesn’t give the President special budgetary powers to enact prohibited transportation. And Congress has specifically said no funds can be used to move prisoners away from Guantanamo Bay. In the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill that Obama signed, Congress put in a stipulation in addition to specifically saying “no money can be used for this activity” it says that any plan by the President to move Guantanamo detainees either to the United States or to a foreign country is subject to Congressional review.
Note that Obama has no interest whatsoever in just releasing them into America, he simply will not do that, and if he did Congress would respond very badly for him. There are over 90 Senators opposed to that sort of thing, it is a deeply unpopular concept to even move them here to live in a Supermax prison. Since Obama’s preferred solution is 100% blocked by Congress he has few options. He probably could find some legal way to transport them on some ship that’s already going somewhere and they “end up” in south Florida somewhere, but Obama would face massive trouble over that and he also personally wants to put them in a domestic Supermax prison, he has zero interest in just releasing them.
It’s when you make statements such as this that I am glad that you have absolutely no say whatsoever in the manner in which my country is governed and at the same time wonder what great sin you committed in a previous life to be born a Dane. It’s hard to think of a more left leaning country, I mean your *right-wingers *were the ones who proposed replacing the entire defense budget with an answering machine that said “we surrender” in Russian.
The prisoners are hunger-striking – attempting to kill themselves. This is a fact. Here are four possible reasons:
- To protest the mistreatment of their Qur’ans (this is their stated reason for the hunger strike)
- To protest their indefinite detention (this is the reason their lawyers have stated)
- To protest other mistreatment
- To simply die (at this point, the only way they’ll be able to leave Gitmo)
All of these point to abuses. Am I missing something?
You’re claiming that they’re “exaggerating and/or misrepresenting what is happening to them”. Is there evidence of this, other than prison officials saying so? And even if they are, it’s only to draw attention to their human rights, whereas if prison officials are lying, it’s to draw attention AWAY FROM their human rights.
People don’t hunger strike to kill themselves, they do it as a form of protest or to make a political statement or point or gain sympathy for your cause. If you just wanted to kill yourself there are easier ways to do it than starving yourself to death.
The thing that struck me in the article posted in the OP was the guy claiming that the feeding tube was the worst pain he’d ever felt. Here is a guy, supposedly having been tortured (at a minimum by the guys who originally captured him before turning him over to the US, not to mention the widespread purported torture going on at Gitmo itself), who is saying that none of that stuff hurt as bad as…having a feeding tube inserted. I mean, I’ve had a feeding tube inserted into my stomach through my nose, and while I wouldn’t say it’s on par with the finest feelings I’ve ever experienced, I have had worse pain than that…many times…and I’ve never been tortured. Granted, I didn’t resist to the point where they had to strap me down, and I didn’t fight it, but still…that seems a bit too feigned to me, and it throws question into his other statements in that article.