The New York Times reports that Barack Obama is likely to sign an executive order calling for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison facility on his first day in office. In addition, they report that the Obama Team is likely to immediately scrap the Military Commissions system and that they are unlikely to ask for a new law that would provide for indefinite detentions within the United States.
However, as Barack Obama noted on Sunday in his conversation with George Stephanopoulos, the actual spadework of transferring the prisoners out of Guantanamo might take a while…perhaps a full year. Many of the prisoners cannot be sent home because their home governments would mistreat them. Third-country sponsors will have to be found to host these people. Others prisoners will need to be prosecuted. And a small number are probably unsafe to release and impossible to convict due to their treatment by American officials. This last group is the one that the Obama Team is refusing to detain indefinitely (under a new law) or to prosecute through the Military Commissions Act. But it’s not clear just what they will do with them.
I don’t support releasing them, but I am also glad they will not be put through the flawed Military Commissions process and that they will not be detained without process. I hope the Obama Team can come up with a solution we can be proud of, or at least live with. There are no good options that I can think of.
In any case, let this be a lesson to people that are inclined to jump on every word Obama utters and make the worst assumptions.
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Elsewhere in the world the judicial proces has led to prosecution, imprisonment and execution of terrorists since 911. So what is the fear factor for Americans and the US Justice Dep’t?
JAKARTA, Indonesia (Bangkok News) Nov. 9, 2008 – Detik.com online news service reported from the port town of Cilacap near Nusakambangan island that their bodies were brought to a nearby clinic for autopsy and would be flown by helicopter to the men’s hometowns for burial.
At the hometown of brothers Amrozi and Mukhlas in the East Java village of Tenggulun, hundreds of militant supporters shouted “Allahu Akbar!” (God is Great) with many of them carrying banners praising the bombers as “heroes,” witnesses said.
A big “Welcome Martyrs” banner was unfurled on the road into the men’s East Java village amid fears of a violent militant backlash across the majority Muslim nation.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Well, in other countries the criminals were not subjected to Cheney’s brand of justice.
I will judge what Obama does when he actually does it.
Words are just words. Talk is cheap and easy. Actions are what counts.
Actions are often cheaper and easier than talk.
Blowing up your adversary, for example, can be easier than trying to persuade him/her.
Israel appears to recognize this and is acting upon it in one way. Others have recognized it and are acting upon it in others.
So many saying, Words are just words! Actions are what count!
I’m against all of them. But, you know, that’s just words.
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(Washington) — Five leading human rights and civil liberties groups delivered a letter to President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 12, 2009, urging him to suspend the Guantanamo Bay military commissions and to ensure that the upcoming trial of Omar Khadr, a 22-year-old Canadian, does not proceed. The trial is scheduled to begin on Jan. 26, six days after the presidential inauguration.
Khadr is slated to be tried before the widely discredited military commissions for war crimes he is alleged to have committed when he was 15. There is broad global recognition that the recruitment and use of children in armed conflict is a serious abuse in itself.
Letter to President-elect Barack Obama
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Even if they are tried in a “real” court, they will be getting a walk courtesy of Bush, Cheney, Et.al. in the administration, something about speedy trial… I really can’t see any of them convicted of anything after the way they have been treated, whether they deserve to be imprisoned or not.
It’s inevitable that someone who was guilty will be released because the Bush gang has corrupted the evidence. Read Suskind’s “The Way of the World” for one story. Obama is stuck with hundreds of men who were sold for bounty, and a few who were really bad guys. The entire system must change.
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Persons suspected of terror acts have been put under strict 24 hour surveilance.
AMSTERDAM: Samir Azzouz (known in Holland only as Samir A.) is only 19, but for almost three years the Dutch authorities have struggled without success to punish him for what they see as plotting terrorism.
Police records show that he was first placed under surveillance in early 2003, when he was in high school, after he was stopped at the Ukrainian border while trying to join Islamic militants in Chechnya.
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Is an intention a crime?
“People with intentions cannot be convicted if there is no link with transforming their intentions into action,” the Dutch justice minister, Jan Piet Hein Donner, said in an interview. “Otherwise, I’d be convicting people for their ideas.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Explain this to me:
Read the first part of the sentence.
How are they unsafe to release? Who are they? What are they going to do, after several years under Bush’s tender mercies?
Colman-
remember, I am talking about a handful of cases here (less than a dozen). The people that we actually did succeed in catching who were part of the 9/11 plot are the exact people who we decided to mistreat and torture. I do not suggest that mistreatment was limited to these individuals, only that the people we most want to keep in custody are precisely the people whose treatment was the worst.
For simplicity’s sake, we can look at Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was a close co-conspirator of Mohammed Atta, but who was repeatedly denied a visa to enter the United States. It is quite possible that al-Shibh could use a variety of procedures to destroy any case we could bring against him because he was denied counsel, habeas corpus rights, allowed to self-incriminate himself against his will, tortured, and whatever else.
There is no fucking way that I want that guy to be released or to ever see the light of day again. I simply do not accept that we have to pay the price of releasing him because of the mistakes and crimes of the Bush administration.
We could never release him to Yemen or Pakistan, and we certainly are not going to release him into the general population of the United States. He would need the equivalent of Witness Protection, and the American people would never support something like that for one of the main plotters of the 9/11 attacks.
This situation was created by Bush and Cheney, and there are no good solutions. What I advocate is holding Bush and Cheney accountable for this, but not letting hardened dangerous murderers free as a result of it.
It’s easy to take a hard, principled stand in favor of the rule of law. It’s harder to face political reality and reality in general. I take no pleasure in taking this position and fully expect to take criticism for it. Nevertheless, I do not support freeing the 9/11 plotters.
Wouldn’t that be alleged 9/11 plotters?
That’s what Bush and co said.
“Realism” boils down to “The rules only apply to us when we say so.” That pretty much sums up the whole problem with US foreign policy (and that of its little European minions).
The hard bit is staying within the rules when its unpleasant to do so.
Watching alleged murderers walk out the door because you fucking tortured them.
Anyway, what do the Germans want that guy for? Anything serious? Would extradition be a solution? Is he even a threat any more?
First thing, day one. Stop the harsh treatment.
Until the prisoners are freed, deported or sent to trial they should all be treated humanely. There are a million things that can be done to improve their treatment: food, clothing, providing reading material, television, etc. They should know that a new President has taken over for Bush.
Many of the prisoners cannot be sent home because their home governments would mistreat them. Third-country sponsors will have to be found to host these people.
No.
We need to find this group of folks places to live within the United States. We need to find them good jobs. If they cannot work for medical reasons (especially reasons stemming from their incarceration), we need to take care of them. If they need education we need to provide that too. Whatever they need should be provided. They may not want to live here – that would be completely understandable – and in those cases we can pay another country that they would be willing to live in to take them and do the same.
It is not enough – it is almost the LEAST we can do to people illegally imprisoned by a president enabled by the American people to do what has been done to them. But by God we need to take care of these people and do whatever we can to try to make amends for what has happened to them. If we can’t send them home, then we can try to make a home for them here.
And if it’s expensive, well, that’s one of the costs of waging war and working outside the bounds of International Law. But war reparations need to be paid, and this is the first step to doing that.
Could not agree more, and if the U.S. really were the moral country, the shining city on the hill, etc. that Americans want to believe it is, that is what will happen.
It won’t.
Inclined to jump on his every word? Why not? Maybe the instant criticism is the reason for this leak (in fact, it almost certainly is, right?), and maybe the entire idea of issuing an order on day one (a plan Obama did not mention in his comments) came up in the last 24 hours in response to the shitstorm his original statements generated. In any case, he hasn’t done anything yet, so the jury is out. But that the Obama camp felt the need to leak this info to blunt criticism simply reinforces what I said in response to the original post on the subject: if influential voices on the left like Booman give Obama a pre-emptive pass on such central issues, there is no doubt what the result will be. Obama will be pulled right, to the so-called center, and we’ll still be in Iraq, still be torturing, still be spying on Americans without warrants, and still be holding prisoners at Gitmo, in 2012. Obama needs pressure, constantly, from the left in order to do the right thing.
Jeff, I tend to agree with you. This sudden announcement following what appeared to be a by now familiar backpedaling motion on Guantanamo looks suspiciously like an attempt at damage control. and even now, I will believe it when I see it.
And now, can we please talk about Iraq? ‘Cause, we’ve been seeing a long of waffling and back pedaling on that one, and Obama’s position on Iraq was, in reality, not ever all that good, despite his campaign’s care to help people believe he was going to get the U.S. out altogether. And Iraq will never start to heal itself until the U.S. is out of there completely.
As for Afghanistan, I don’t think there is any hope for Obama on that. He is talking about going in entirely the wrong direction.
PS Lost my main point, which is that by making excuses for Obama for backing away from doing the right thing, people are enabling just that. For me it is not about drifting to the right, or left, or center, it is about doing what is right, what makes sense, what will work, what the people want, and sticking to the promises and principles of his campaign.
I agree that we need to watch carefully and call him on it when he starts to head in the wrong direction. How many times has it been said and by how many great and wise people that it is a mistake to sit back and let the government lead unless you don’t care where you go. It is the people’s responsibility to lead the government.
that they are unlikely to ask for a new law that would provide for indefinite detentions within the United States.
Oh, that’s so much better. I can haz habeas corpus bak now?