The court order last week to release five Algerian men who had been held at Guantanamo Bay for seven years was another rebuke of the Bush administration’s unconstitutional detention program. President Bush had claimed during his 2002 State of the Union address that the men were part of a plot to bomb a U.S. embassy. But once detainees were finally given the right to challenge their detention, thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the government dropped the embassy allegation. Now a Bush-appointed judge has ruled that the government didn’t have evidence to hold the men. Robert C. Kirsch, one of the detainees’ attorneys, said the case showed “the human cost of what can happen when mistakes are made at the highest levels of our government, and no one has the courage to acknowledge those mistakes.” It also shows what can happen when our government sets aside the very principles that made our country great.
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I have said it many times that this is a war of ideologies Bin Laden’s goal is not to conquer the land but to cause us to surrender our core principles. Our sense of right and wrong this was a major victory for Bin Laden and a sorrowful loss for the United States. When we say that we could not care less for someone else’s basic rights and are willing to not be just in our actions. We are surrendering to his goals and giving away our own rights and justice. In this action, it is about how the enemy is treated as much as how willing we are to quit our core principles in the face of human temptation.
The legacy of the Bush regime and their war on Terra.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/21/191657/65/267/627232
Conservatives probably don’t want to go to the link since it offers images of reality.
The Pentagon was caught lying about the number of children they had detained at Gitmo. Previously claiming they only had twelve children it appears they really had 22 children.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Number_of_juveniles_held_at_Guantanamo_1121.html
Yeah, they are all innocent…
Let’s pause for a moment of s silence as a reminder of their total innocence…Okay done.
#
Regular
Posted November 23, 2008 at 9:11 am | Permalink
Yeah, they are all innocent…
Let’s pause for a moment of s silence as a reminder of their total innocence…Okay done.
=========================================================
Innocence is not the problem. The problem is bypassing the Constitution of this country to deny legal representation of the accused. But you do make a point: In this country, a person is innocent until proven guilty, something the republicans of this country seem to have conveniently forgotten.
And there is no way of knowing their guilt or innocence until they are tried in a court of law.
The lib news media just can’t leave Gitmo along. This prison was mean’t to hold terrorists and killers, letting them loose in the name of justice; to kill again, serves no human purpose. If let loose who will keep track of them in the future? Will the judge and the friendly trail lawyers be responsible if they kill and bomb again, not likely.
Gitmo is the latest scar, but the scars started much earlier and may have deeper consequences. At a trade show in Germany years ago, an Indian government delegate related how as a junior member of the his delegation to the UN in the 50’s- early 60’s he was routinely discriminated against by the service/hotel industry because of his skin color and learned not to expect any kind of accomodation when en route to Washington. The same was true with Pakistani and African delegations who faced Jim Crow attitudes while stationed at the UN. These lowly clerks became powerful government mandarins with not-so-fond memories of their American experience, and not too eager to accomodate Americas wishes, especially Pakistan.
The most basic conservative concept is limiting the power of government.
A government that can put anyone in jail without judicial review will, in fact, anyone reserve the right to incarcerate anyone.
Unless that abuse of presidential power is repudiated and, well, changed.
If a Chicago Muslim can be jailed for 7 years without a lawyer or a writ of habeas corpus or a speedy trial, another Chicagoan — who you wing-nuts claim is a secret Muslim — can cart you off to the pokey, “george” or “Regular” “ICTisInferior” or “JimJohnson” or “Boxlock20″ for no reason whatsoever.
I trying to figure out the downside to that. But it’s there somewhere, I suspect.
The problem is bypassing the Constitution of this country to deny legal representation of the accused.
Regular doesn’t care. As long as it isn’t him, what difference does it make? Same for the rest of the Cons.
Regular doesn’t care. As long as it isn’t him, what difference does it make? Same for the rest of the Cons.
That is the beginning and the end of their reasoning process. Whatever the issue, it’s all about “me”, and they expect everyone else to be secretly thinking the same way. Yet, strangely, it never occurs to them that the unrestrained powers they hand to government can and will be used against them, if it becomes expedient for the government to do so.
Or maybe it does, belatedly. Notice all the exaggerated Obama paranoia? Maybe their ultimate guiding principle is “Might makes right,” and believed they were safe so long as they were visible sycophants to power.
And now that the “enemy” has won, they expect the excessive powers they’ve granted to the King be used against them.
Which is really kinda hilarious, in a way!
I guess it is inconceivable to the cons that there are a lot of innocent people being held at Gitmo. Sizable bounties were offered to anyone who would give the name of a suspected terrorist. In a country where the economy was somewhere south of dismal the obvious happened. Anyone who had a grudge against a neighbor turned them in for a quick handful of cash and the “suspect” was quickly whisked off to Gitmo or Abu Grhaib or one of the detention facilities run by the private companies contracted to discretely handle interrogation. That is just one of the reasons a large number of innocent people have been detained for so long by an administration which gladly defends the Constitution so long as it doesn’t interfere with their agenda. Stay tuned. When the keys to Gitmo are handed over to the new administration and the complete truth starts to be revealed we will find that we have only scratched the surface of the level of shame that we will feel as a nation.
This thread is represented perfectly by the picture of old glory behind fences and barbed wire.
I propose that on January 22, 2009, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addison, Yoo and any other pertinent personnel be rounded up, shackled and blindfolded and put on an unmarked Gulfstream to be delivered into the hands of the World Court in the Hague, along with the necessary documents needed to try them for war crimes under the Geneva Conventions. This is the necessary first step in regaining the moral authority our nation lost during the Bush administration, and I’m sure the court will be kinder to them than they were to the prisoners tortured in Guantanamo and Abu Graib. At least they will get a trial! If we don’t do it, the consequences to our nation will last for decades and the precedents set by these men will be used with umpugnity on our own people and we will have nothing to say about it.