One thing that was confirmed by the recent WikiLeaks release is that the rest of the world is significantly less inclined to take any of the innocent prisoners at Guantanamo because we are not willing to take them ourselves.
…the rest of the world sees Guantanamo as a collection of both innocents and genuine enemies, as illustrated by hundreds of Bush-era releases and dozens of court decisions ordering detainees’ release and wonders why some of the innocents can’t resettle in the United States.
The answer to that question is that we live in a country of bedwetters. Maybe you aren’t a bedwetter. But most of your neighbors probably are. And, as far as I can tell, the Republican Party’s foreign policy is based on instilling primal fear in the American people (and, seemingly, themselves) so that they can go about doing what they wanted to do anyway. But, worst of all, the Republicans expect politicians from all over the world to house people whose mere presence in the United States (the Republicans believe) would invite catastrophic terrorist attacks and/or whom are so diabolical that they can escape from our SuperMax prisons.
The world knows that the people we want to release are innocent. They see a puddle of piss around our ankles and they wonder why our fear is their problem and responsibility.
The president tried to do the right thing. He has been trying. And he’s got no support. He’s got no support from his own party. He really hasn’t had much support from the corporate media. Outside of a bunch of cheeto-munching patriots in the blogosphere, no one seems willing to make a stink about Guantanamo or complain about Congress’s refusal to allocate funds for the transfer of inmates to the United States.
Under the Defense Department appropriations bill that Obama signed into law two weeks ago, the administration not only can’t use Pentagon funds to bring detainees to the United States for trial, but must certify that countries meet a set of security conditions before the U.S. can send detainees to them.
In a signing statement, Obama objected to those restrictions, but he did not say he’d ignore them.
I have mixed feelings about that signing statement. How about you?
