Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is right about the military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba: It should be closed. Yesterday. The detainees currently held there should be moved to U.S. prisons and tried in U.S. courts. “The concern was,” Powell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” “well, then they’ll have access to lawyers, then they’ll have access to writs of habeas corpus. So what? Let them. Isn’t that what our system is all about?” As he also said, despots around the world now point to Gitmo, fairly or not, to justify their own violations of the rule of law and human rights. “We don’t need it, and it’s causing us far more damage than any good we get for it,” Powell said.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
Registered?
Commenting on WE Blog now requires you to be a Kansas.com member. Use the links above to register, if you haven't already, or to log in.Contact us
Follow us
Daily Archives
-
Recent Comments
- Regular on ACORN stole election?
- thomaswitt on ACORN stole election?
- Daniel on Open thread 11/21
- Daniel on ACORN stole election?
- Phantom on Open thread 11/21
- Daniel on Open thread 11/21
- thomaswitt on ACORN stole election?
- Regular on Open thread 11/21
- Phantom on ACORN stole election?
- thomaswitt on ACORN stole election?
41 Comments
what a suprise.
a negative article about the administration/republicans/war on terror.
what a surprise.
colin powell finally seeing the light
Powell also said that we deal with “bad guys” allthe time and the fact that we have over 2 million in jail proves that point.
Gitmo was designed after the “facility 1391″ where torture techniques were perfected in Israel. That “facility 1391″ was airbrushed off all maps including the road which leads up to it and Gitmo was established to circumvent the rule of international law which the Israelis operate under. WE don’t need them or it.
The “war on terror” is a sick joke. Nothing more than a meaningless slogan.
Actually it IS a surprise. Powell, the quintessential, archetypical Good Soldier, is speaking out against this Administration’s illegal policies. The rumors of his views have been circulating for years, but he’s been very reluctant to speak publicly.
I say we draft Powell for President.
The “Republican Party” has been hijacked by neocons, a lawless group of wanabe thugs looking to overturn our American government.
Colin Powell is an american hero. His service to his country is irreproachable. This president used him and his credibility to sell the world his line of crap regarding Iraq. Powell is 10 times more qualified to be president than the idiot that actually is president. He ditched the administration at first chance …maybe we all should have looked a little closer at why he left before the 06 election. Gitmo serves no purpose other than to walk on the Constitution and embarass the US on a global scale.
It makes the fundies feel safe at night…and scares the rest of the world to death. This facility has set the reputation of the US back 50 years. You cannot claim the moral high ground and still allow a facility like this to operate. CLOSE GITMO NOW!
So far the Bush regime has dragged two Americans into prison where they were kept in solitary confinement without access to lawyers and never charged with any crimes. One of those American’s “crimes” was moving to America in Sept. 2001 to go to school to earn a Master’s degree. He has been disappeared for four years and today a federal court says his rights have been violated and he must be released.
He ditched the administration at first chance …
No, he stayed with them far too long and has remained quiet far too long. Even with this little bit of dissent he has stayed too loyal to them.
Ben,
Did you see Meet the Press yesterday? At the end, Russert asked Powell if he’d made an “endorsement” decision for the 08 Presidential race. He said no, and when pressed, said he wasn’t even going to commit to endorsing the Republican candidate. He left the door wide open to backing a Democratic nominee. Very interesting…
When Powell left the damage was already done. Has he been quiet?…..yes. Give him time to continue to shed light on this administration. He will. Funny, how we are debating whether Gitmo should be closed. The fundies and their presidential nominees are talking about doubling the size of Gitmo. Do we live on seperate planets or what?
To me, the people incarcarated at Gitmo represent special problems that cannot be addressed with the normal court system. They are rightly not POWs, nor are they American citizens, or normal lawbreakers. I am not sure what to do with them, but i most certainly do not want them clogging up the federal court system with endless appeals. The military tribunals seem to me to be the best solution. Maybe not. I think this is an usual situaiton, and bears some real thinking, not just knee jerk reaciton on either side.
Gitmo is a symptom of a very sick group Zionists and neocons who are ready to start a nuclear war in the Middle East. Senator Joe Lieberman all but begged to attack Iran which only threatens to defend itself by suggesting retaliation against Israeli if they start a war.
The translation from Farsi to English was wrong, in that Iranian President did not say “wipe Israel off of the Map” but rather relocate it to somewhere in Europe.
The Russians are offering defensive weapons to Iran and Bush has managed to antagonize Russian President Putin who has his trigger finger on 10,000 nuclear weapons.
There is just no end to Gooneybird Bush.
General Powell looks good because Schwartzkopft made him look good.
Without Schwartzkopft, Powell would have just have been another retired General.
Ed — You are very right on the Farsi translation… The crawler translator had it right… the voice translator got it wrong… Politics?? Maybe??
Schwarzkopf might have helped Powell look good in Gujlf War I… but Powell made himself in the years between…
Yea, but Powell pretty much ‘made himself’ a stooge for Bush.
Well, good point Ben… but something tells me he is a little sorry about that now… after watching the Russert interview..
I have a feeling that Bush(err, Cheney) has made a LOT of stooges!
I have a strong suspicion that Cheney and Co., figured Bush would be long since forced into resignation by now, and their little tin horns would be in charge… But, thats just a strong suspicion…
Did anybody else get a huge “?” over Bush’s surprise visit to Albania??? You know, that former Communist country where 3 of those 6 Ft. Dix yahoos came from?? Seemed sort of odd to me.. But there go my suspicions again…
The People in Gitmo are POWs from Afghanistan. A Country where the United States when well beyond bombing those responsible for the 9/11 attack and used the event to launch the phony “war on so-called terror.” The “terror tag” had worked so well for the Israelis to describe the retaliation of the Palestinians against their brutal occupation, that the sick Zionists and neocons disguised their Middle East conquest against the phony backdrop of the nonexistence of “terror.”
To prove that point, they went on into Iraq, also on a phony premise to continue their conquest.
The sad result of their war crimes is a million have died needlessly, including American soldiers, while the traitors here at home still push their unAmerican treason { under the guise of a political adgenda }.
The destruction of the United States is treason, not politics at home or from Israel.
Ed, the scary thing is, you MIGHT be right!! You check out Ron Paul’s campaign lately??
Thanks Chas.
I don’t copy anyone, I just see what I see and write about it.
Chas
Cheney pulls Bush’s strings as Bush is not smart enough to even understand what he is told to say.
Powell is still dissembling.
Gitmo wasn’t set up to protect America from terrorists. It was set up to protect US torture from the scrutiny of the courts, since it is after all, illegal.
Powell helped set all this up and now wants to condemn it?
Ride with horse theives . . . hang with horse theives.
I fully agree. Try them in US courts or let them go. If you have evidence, bring it. Otherwise send em home. I suspect a good percentage of these people have not done anything anyway.
“Powell helped set all this up and now wants to condemn it?”
Powell hands are dirty and now he is trying to wash them, thinking that the American public won’t notice the dirt under his fingernails.
It won’t work.
“The detainees currently held there should be moved to U.S. prisons and tried in U.S. courts.”
I cannot help it to say that the U.S. government is demonstrating double standards in their policy.Although the prisoners are accused of being war criminals, why should they be given their day in court?They are no more different then the 12 to 20 million criminals that we call illegal immigrants and yet the Bush Administration is trying give the illegal immigrants amnesty.
Wiseman,
the Illegals work for $2 an hour and make republicans money…
Terrorists cost republicans money…
Wiseman,
The purpose of the trials is to weed out the innocent picked up in Iraq and Afghanistan from the truly dangerous.
Even so, what the status of terrorists has to do with the status of illegal aliens eludes me.
Wiseman,
Since when did the Guantanamo detainees become “war criminals?”
“Although the prisoners are accused of being war criminals, why should they be given their day in court?”
The worst war criminals in recent history were given their day in court at Nuremberg. If that was good enough to deal with the Nazis, then it should be good enough for al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Contrary to some opinions, the Nazis and their Japanese and Italian brethren were the greatest threat to civilization in this century (and most others) so to claim that Islamic terrorists are a greater threat is just so much bullshit.
Well put WSClark
This is what happens when our “brainless Bush” gets sookered by a real man: Vladimir Putin
“From Arab News”
“Putin’s Political AmbushGwynne Dyer, Arab News”Vladimir Putin is definitely a player, and the proposal that the Russian president sprang on George W. Bush at the G-8 meeting in Germany on Thursday was a classic political ambush. You claim to be putting interceptor missiles and X-band radars into Eastern Europe to intercept nuclear-tipped, long-range missiles coming out of Iran, said Putin to Bush. So why don’t you make our radar station in Azerbaijan, which overlooks all of Iran from its perch high in the Caucasus Mountains, part of the system?
The Bush administration has no intention of letting Russia share in its beloved Ballistic Missile Defense system (aka “Son of Star Wars”), nor does Russia believe that the system is either necessary or functional, but Putin’s negotiating ploy was brilliant. If Iran had either nuclear weapons or long-range ballistic missiles (which it doesn’t), and if the United States had the technological capability to intercept such missiles (which it doesn’t), then access to a Russian radar station in the mountains north of Iran would be exactly what Washington wanted.
“Let’s let our experts have a look at it,” said President Bush about Putin’s “interesting proposal,” and that’s the last that anybody will hear about that, but it did give Putin the opportunity to show that the new US bases in Eastern Europe are not about what Washington says they are about. So what are they about?
That is a lot harder to answer, because the whole BMD boondoggle is a weapons system in search of a threat. 25 years ago, when the blessed Ronald Reagan first proposed the “Star Wars” system, it was going to shoot down thousands of Soviet warheads with directed energy beams, just like in the movies. Very cool. But now there is no Soviet Union, and the only BMD technology that actually exists is clunky missiles that occasionally manage to shoot down other missiles, but mostly miss or just don’t launch.
Time to move on, you might think, but Reagan is a Republican saint, and George W. Bush had promised to roll out some BMD system when he became president. Besides, there are several hundred thousand jobs in the US military and defense industry that depend directly or indirectly on BMD. So the system was unstoppable, even if it didn’t work, and in 2002 the Bush administration tore up the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty in order to be free to deploy it.
The next question was where to put it. The first choices were Alaska and California, in order to intercept the intercontinental ballistic missiles that North Korea doesn’t have. Next on the agenda, obviously, was stopping the nonexistent Iranian missiles, which required US radars and interceptor missile bases in Eastern Europe. The Polish and Czech governments eagerly volunteered to host them, not because they believe in a threat from Iran (they don’t), but because they don’t like Russia and badly want American bases of some sort on their soil.
It actually isn’t the dysfunctional American missiles that may be installed in Eastern Europe to stop a nonexistent Iranian threat that annoy the Russians. They are just a useful stick to beat the Americans with. It’s everything else that the United States and NATO have done to the Russians over the past ten years.
Shortly after he came into office, Putin asked to join NATO. The Cold War was supposedly over, but Russia’s request was rejected out of hand. Instead NATO took in new members all across Eastern Europe — and even on the territory of the former Soviet Union, in the case of the Baltic republics. After the Cold War, NATO promised not to build new military installations in former Warsaw Pact territory, but the new bases are there in Romania and Bulgaria, and now more are planned in Poland and the Czech Republic.
In a word, arrogance. The Russians don’t count any more, so we don’t need to take their interests into account any more. Which is why, in Munich last February, Putin talked bluntly about the old days when “there was an equilibrium and a fear of mutual destruction. In those days one party was afraid to make an extra step without consulting the others.
In Moscow last week, just before Putin left for the G-8 meeting, a journalist asked him: “Why are the Americans so obstinate about putting these plans for (ballistic missile defenses) into practice, if it is so clear that they are unnecessary?”
Putin replied: “Possibly this is to push us to (retaliate in ways that would prevent) further closeness of Russia and Europe…. I cannot exclude this possibility.” As if US foreign policy under President Bush has ever been that subtle and sophisticated. It’s a good thing that both Putin and Bush are leaving office soon.”http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=97388&d=12&m=6&y=2007&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Ed,
Shut up.
Thanks.
Thanks Tom…
“What the status of terrorists has to do with the status of illegal aliens eludes me.Posted by: BFAH | June 11, 2007 at 07:13 PM”
Hey BFAH, it eludes the president too, as to knowing what a criminal is.
Oh, they both may be breaking the law, like a thief and a rapist are breaking the law…but the crimes in and of themselves aren’t related.
Why is it that everyone seems to feel obliged to take potshots, Wiseman? BTW, I’m resisting the urge to throw one back at you.
Oh, My, The two little piss ants are out.