Last time I brought up the fact that the US knew that a lot of people imprisoned without trial at Guantanamo Bay were known by the US government to be innocent, the reply was that they’d already been released, and that the only remaining prisoners were legitimately bad people.
My position is this: if there is actual evidence that any of these men are terrorists, they should be charged and see their day in court. Any for whom this evidence does not exist should be immediately freed, even if that means giving them permanent residence in the US and a nice house to say “Sorry we couldn’t free you earlier”. Should any of them prove to be terrorists after all - either because they were already or because it would be hard not to start hating the people who kidnapped you, tortured you and locked you up for a decade for no good reason - all blame for “letting terrorists walk free” lies with the idiots who sabotaged any hope of getting uncorrupted evidence out of them by resorting to torture.
And Obama, who continues to protect torturers from justice, supports indefinite detention without trial, and sought to relocate the abuses of Gitmo onto American soil, is scum.
This happened here? Can you link the exchange, because if it went down like that, and there poster was not soundly called on that factual error, then something is wrong. We’ve known for a long time that many people being held there can’t be released because no country will accept them.
And I’m not seeing that there’s anything Obama can do about this. Well, maybe he can be faulted for not pushing harder on the home countries of these people so they can be release. There’s no way he could release them in the US. Congress wouldn’t allow it.
I’m having a lot of difficulty with the whole concept of releasing these people; similarly, I don’t understand why they need a trial.
As I understand it, they were captured while participating in armed conflict, therefore they are prisoners of war. Therefore, they can legitimately be held for the duration.
During WWII, we didn’t put prisoners on trial; nor did we release them until after the war. So what is different here?
In addition, as I understand the Geneva Convention, if someone is caught bearing arms while not wearing a recognized uniform, or while not clearly identifying as being part of a recognized army, they can be shot on sight. There is no obligation to take them prisoner.
So, legitimately, we can take the Gitmo prisoners and shoot them. Why are we not doing that?
Can you quote the part of the GC that says you can shoot a captured prisoner? These guys aren’t POWs, as they aren’t part of a uniformed, state controlled military. The GC says they need to have a hearing to determine their status, and they must be treated humanly in the interim.
Many of these people just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some were turned in by enemy tribes and had no part in any hostilities. It is not so black and white as you seem to think.
Eh, they did admit they were mostly going by a single article which I had posted. Consider this my attempt to bring the problem to people’s attention.
According to the article it was the Obama Administration and not Yemen which opposed his return. And if that was not sufficient, he does have the ear of the nation, doesn’t he? If the President of the United States holds a press release saying Adnan Latif has been accused of no crime, there is no corroborated evidence that he has even met a member of al-Qaida until he was locked up at Gitmo, and that the presumption of innocence demands that he be released, would Congress hold their ground?
They are not prisoners of war; we carefully avoided calling them that in an attempt to justify their torture. Nor were they necessarily captured while fighting us or anyone else; we grabbed people because someone accused a personal enemy they wanted eliminated, or someone wanted the reward money we were offering, or someone we were torturing blurted out some random name to try to get us to stop, or just because we felt like it.
They aren’t POWS, and the “war” will never end. Should we keep them there for life? Even the innocent ones?
Because killing random innocent people looks bad and the world is watching. Otherwise I’m sure we would have long since have tortured them all to death and dumped the bodies in the ocean, then denied we ever had them.
Of course they would. The Republicans would oppose it because opposing Obama is what they do, and the Democrats are spineless unprincipled cowards terrified of being called “weak” by the Republicans.
In fairness, he can’t do that in an election year. It would be political suicide. Even in a second term, the fallout would render him impotent for all practical purposes. Depending on how the House elections turn out, it might even get him impeached.
And not particularly convincing anyway. Why would it be political suicide? Would you refuse to vote for Obama for daring to defend an innocent, non-terrorist man wrongly locked up at Guantanamo Bay?
I am not voting for Obama anyway, so whatever he does about it is irrelevant to me.
Politics is not about truth and justice. Politics is a blood sport. Spin is king. Doing as you suggest would open the door to the inevitable claims of being soft on terrorists, un-American, possibly treasonous, and otherwise unsuitable. . It would cost him lots of votes, and this election is going to be close…a lot closer than most of the political pundits on this board think. Handing his opponent an issue like that would amount to tendering his resignation for all practical intents and purposes. He’d have a better chance if he were caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.
Remember what Congress did when when Obama signed an executive order that authorized the closing of Guantanamo and would have moved its prisoners to U.S. jails?
I’m not seeing an answer to my question, Grumman. You asked if Congress would fight Obama over something like this and I pointed out that they already did. Do you think they wouldn’t do it again?
So what you’re saying is that his enemies would attack him with one arm tied behind their backs, accusing him of being soft on terrorists for declaring that a non-terrorist should be freed (and that actual terrorists should not be in Gitmo but scattered across bomb craters) and of being un-American for upholding the US Constitution, and Obama’s too weak to stand up to even that?
No, they did not fight Obama over something like this, because Obama never tried something like this. Senator Feingold even wrote a letter to Obama explicitly stating that the failure to address the key problems with Gitmo is why he refused to fund its relocation to the continental US.