Gitmo was the first thing that clued me that I had made a mistake voting for Obama's promises (not that McCain would have ever gotten it instead!). It was such a complete reversal that I immediately knew his promises were completely worthless.
I appreciate that there may be anger outs people in Gitmo, but they have every right to a trial I have. The double standard of what human rights mean if you are a US citizen and if you aren't makes me physically ill.
As a country, in many ways we deserve the disdain directed at us.
That said, we are not only Gitmo, and we actually do a lot of good things for the world. We just need to get our government to respect our borders.
This is the closest he's come to keeping his campaign pledges to reverse the idiocy of the Bush era, but he failed, and then he even reversed his own executive order in 2011. Like suspension of habeas rights, like warrantless wiretaps, like drone warfare, like the TSA, President Obama didn't make these things, but he still chooses to use them. A lot.
Obama was the only hope people like me saw for reversing the 9/11 death spiral, and he blew it. End the war in the Middle East? Naw, let's escalate it instead. Reform the Patriot Act? How about I reauthorize it as-is. End indefinite detention of Americans without trial? No, continue indefinite detentions without trial and/or execute Americans without a trial. Transparent government? How about secret laws instead. Stop rousting foreigners? Nope, let's ICE record numbers of immigrants. Veto NDAA? Sign NDAA! Veto CISPA?
The trends in the Obama administration are the exact opposite of what people voted for. His legacy is more power for ICE and TSA; more power for national security agencies; more intrusive government; more war; more unprincipled, reactionary policy making. Zero upside.
I get why people defend their candidates in the face of conflicting evidence. Obviously people believe their candidate, no matter how bad, is better than the alternative. But Obama's a lame duck. There's no reason to shield him or blame this on someone else who's already out of office, though don't get me wrong here: Bush was a truly horrible President. It doesn't solve the core problem, which is the we need a leader in 2016 who will lead us out of this spiral. Unfortunately neither party is worth a damn right now.
I never understood why people got mad at Obama for not closing Gitmo. The president is not the king. He/she still needs approval from Congress to get most shit done. In the case of Gitmo, his initiative got blocked by politicians who were too worried about what voting yes would mean for their own political careers.
For anyone who actually understands politics, the failure to close Gitmo was not Obama's fault.
"For anyone who actually understands politics, the failure to close Gitmo was not Obama's fault."
I disagree. For anyone that understands politics understands that things can get done by applying a significant political push. I think Obama symbolically tried, then threw his hands up in the air in defeat when he got some resistance from Congress. I assume this is because the political chips he would lose by pushing harder on closing Gitmo are chips he was not willing to lose.
Meanwhile, CISPA, which was already defeated once, is making its way through Congress again. It's a perfect example of "political push" (and if you read between the lines, that means "money").
I agree with you, people need to be motivated about closing Gitmo. People won't be motivated to do anything about it as long as everyone inside Gitmo is labeled a terrorist.
If Obama et al truly felt that closing Gitmo was a priority, the news would be packed day after day with stories from the prison, humanizing the prisoners, and introduction of one legislation measure after another, all to drum up support (just like gun control). But that just isn't happening, which makes me conclude it's a lack of effort for whatever reason.
In your experience, the ground that you did lose, was it because of lack of support? Could you have tried again and how? (I don't have any political experience, so I'm kind of curious)
What motivates people is the human interest angle. The people upholding Gitmo have been very effective at keeping the detainees nameless and faceless.
--
I worked on election integrity. Stuff like opposing internet voting, touchscreens, purging the voter registration databases, etc.
When we lost it was because we were a day late, a dollar short, outgunned, exhausted, ignorant, naive, internal strive, etc.
It's important to remember that our opponents have essentially unlimited resources. They also have the long view. You won this time? No biggie. They'll be back. They're happy with incrementalism, and will convert those inches into yards into miles.
A few years ago, remembering the prior overwhelming opposition to internet voting, they suspended the rules and fast-tracked the legislation. So no public hearings. The deed was done before we even noticed. This is why interest groups hire lobbyists; activism is not something you can sustain on a casual basis.
I will try again. Not quite done recharging my batteries.
Meanwhile, I'm working on better advocacy tools. So that future me and other activists have better data, tools, resources. A bit like the open government stuff from Sunlight Foundation. But more like the commercial legislation information systems that big lobbyists use.
--
Some non-political friends wanted to know how to get involved. The key is to show up.
I encouraged them to pick their local city council meetings and just start showing up. (Many are televised or available via web.) Just being present will change their behavior. And there's absolutely a current local issue that you have an opinion on. So once you figure out what's what, you should testify.
I make no defense of Obama, or any other elected. I just want to understand the game better, to play it better. So I'm more curious what it'd take to close Gitmo.
Not my issue, so I haven't looked. But key policy makers (blocking no votes) would have to be identified and moved. And that would take sustained years long local action, eg me and 100 of my friends camping in my Senator's or Representative's office. Ditto probably 40 other local groups. Hard to pull off.
Sen. Henry Waxman's book The Waxman Report relates how his office has worked on some issues for decades, what it takes to move the needle. Very pragmatic, so in a way very optimistic.
I'm currently chewing through The Politics of Attention, which melds Stephen Jay Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium with social influence (power ranking). The basic idea is that policy makers have limited attention and stuff changes all at once when an issue rises above the noise.
And that would take sustained years long local action, eg me and 100 of my friends camping in my Senator's or Representative's office. Ditto probably 40 other local groups. Hard to pull off.
Yeah, Obama doesn't have to do any of this. Maybe the "sustained years" part for some issues, but that's the limits of commonality between your tools and Obama's.
That's a lot of metaphor there. No matter the "chips", and "pushing", it's still the legislative branch that makes the laws. There's got to be a limit to the blame you can assign someone for failing to convince someone else to do something.
I really can't subscribe to that argument when you look at other national issues for which the President is fighting tooth and nail. Without straying too far from the subject, take gun control as an example [and please note, I am deliberately writing this from a partisan-agnostic perspective]. The opposition to this is fierce, and the issue extremely polarizing. Yet, the President seems to be willing to go the distance on the issue of gun control. The movement has failed again and again to gain bipartisan support. Yet, here we are still talking about it in the news. Same can be said about abortion, too. These debates went on for decades now.
Nobody can say the President isn't trying hard enough in those cases, whichever side of the fence you happen to fall on. Yet, when we talk about basic human rights, the President somehow gets to just give up on the issue, and we should be OK with that? In my opinion, there is definitely a lack of effort by the President to do something about closing Gitmo, and I find that almost as disappointing as Gitmo being opened in the first place.
He made a huge deal about trying to get the detainees legal trials in New York. It was a big political story for a number of weeks.
What would have had him do, specifically? He tried, it clearly wasn't happening. Maybe he should try again, but I can tell you the same exact thing would happen again. That would be your symbolic gesture.
It's simple really. It cost the GOP no bad Karma to let Cheney and Bush open the thing. The President called it a "military camp" so legally it was the same as keeping these bad guys in a tent in Iraq.
For Obama to MOVE THEM would have required some kind of law to put them in Federal courts, or even standard Military courts. Also, congress threatened to EXPLICITLY tell the President no funds were available.
... Kind of like how the 1980 congress told Reagan there would be no funds available to trade for hostages. In 1980 Reagan just went ahead and BROKE THE LAW something Obama has too much respect to do. The issue was divisive enough That Obama couldn't count in his own slim majority to vote on his side. Because Obama doesn't RULE the Democrats like Cheney did.
Actually he could have issued an executive order to release the prisoners unilaterally. That would have pissed off Congress of course but as the Commander in Chief the original rational for imprisonment came from the White House and thus could have been reversed. That he didn't do that in response to the Congressional back pressure proved to me that he didn't have the leadership to follow through.
He doesn't want to release the prisoners, he wants to transfer them from military to civilian control so they can be tried in a public court. The later, as I understand it, is beyond the President's remit (but I stand to be shown otherwise).
The politics are less subtle than that. I believe that you are correct in what the President wants vs what he can do. The assertion was that Congress, which is the only part of our Government that can appropriate funds, was unwilling to fund that effort.
In that stalemate, you negotiate. And the Congress certainly wants at least some of the prisoners to be tried in the US court system. So the President, in the absence of getting the funding to move them into the private court system, threatens to simply release them all back to their home countries.
The leadership here is that "we" as a nation don't deprive people of their liberty without due process on principle. And while we recognize the expedience of detaining people during war time, nearly everyone seems to be believe that the prisoner's at Guantanamo are not sanctioned "prisoners of war" per the Geneva Convention. Being neither duck nor fowl puts them in limbo.
The President promised to change that, he did not. He could have (not in a way that Congress approved) but the world in general would be much better off if you either shot these people in battle when they were shooting at you, or you charged them with a crime and tried them, or you let them go. When he left these people incarcerated, he removed another item where the US used to be 'different' from authoritarian regimes, and as a voter I've been working to change the regime through the institutions available to me to do so.
An argument could be made that Obama was young, inexperienced and naive when he made those promises. But that's leaps and bounds different than accusing him of making promises and then breaking them. Because that implies malice. It implies that he lied. And I don't think we have any proof of that. Personally, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He's not a perfect president, but he's not awful either (like the parent implies).
Especially during his 2008 campaign, as much as (or more so, parsing the details of his language) making specific, topical promises, Obama... "preached" and promised to be an advocate.
I think that as much as in specific deliverables, "the Left" feels rather thoroughly betrayed, on that front.
In this specific instance, he should have called Congress out on their behavior.
People understand real compromise. They also understand that when the other party is completely intractable, there comes a time when you confront them on this. Or you lose power.
Or... your original position was actually different from what you projected.
Obama did call Congress out on their behavior. Openly, publicly and many times.
It accomplished absolutely nothing.
Look, when you have an entrenched party, backed up by the ultra-rich, that has sworn to do anything in its power to make sure you fail, there's not much you can do, even if you are the President of the United States.
Didn't the Dems have both houses of Congress for the first two years? Unless the "entrenched party, backed up by the ultra-rich" you're talking about is the Democratic party (I would argue that it is both).
Due a lawsuit and illness and death the Democrats had a filibuster breaking majority for something like 58 days. And even then it would require every single senator to be in agreement.
So because the Democrats didn't have total control on Congress, they aren't responsible for the failures to drive issues forward? They had a majority. They should step up and take ownership for their part.
I remember when we expected statemen to work out difficult conflicts. Now they just throw up their hands and say "He did it" while people cheer them on for "sticking to their guns". It isn't our fault, they are the ones that refused to compromise by accepting my proposal...
Below shows that Obama can indeed take action to take prisoners of gitmo to trial. any reason he hasn't done any of this?
It looks like the document 'blocking money' in fact describes what the president would need to do to bring people to trial and even free them.... Am I missing something? Why hasn't he done this it seems pretty straight forward... I know hes a busy guy but I would put this shit high up there on my priority list...
c) None of the funds made available in this or any prior
Act may be used to transfer an individual who is detained, as
of the date of enactment of this Act, at Naval Station, Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba, into the continental United States, Alaska, Hawaii,
or the District of Columbia, for the purposes of prosecuting such
individual, or detaining such individual during legal proceedings,
until 45 days after the plan detailed in subsection (d) is received.
--------------------------------------------
Subsection d goes on to list what is needed.
(1) The findings of an analysis regarding any risk to the
national security of the United States that is posed by the
transfer of the individual.
(2) The costs associated with transferring the individual
in question.
(3) The legal rationale and associated court demands for
transfer.
(4) A plan for mitigation of any risk described in paragraph
(1).
(5) A copy of a notification to the Governor of the State
to which the individual will be transferred or to the Mayor . R. 2346—63
of the District of Columbia if the individual will be transferred
to the District of Columbia with a certification by the Attorney
General of the United States in classified form at least 14
days prior to such transfer (together with supporting documentation and justification) that the individual poses little
or no security risk to the United States
On days like these the US is Guantanamo Bay. The US is poverty and regular people without a home. The US is bad health care, as in only the rich can afford it. The US is drones, fired at civilians in the dead of night. The US is oil, as in that they want it all. The US is guns, like the ones likely to be pointed at you if you get robbed. The US is x-rays at the airport.
Unfortunately, you won't always find content you're looking for. It's just statistics. The article is political in nature and the comments are likely to be as well; if it's not what you're looking for, you may safely ignore it and rest assured that it's a statistical anomaly that won't undermine the entire community.
the article, or the opinion espoused by the commenter you replied to?
In other words, you come to HN for one aspect of the Political world , and not all of them?
Myself, I don't come to HN for ANYTHING in this thread. It's all interesting, in it's own right, but has little to do with 'hacking'.
But, then again, civil liberties are a set of issues that can broadly affect us all.. maybe that was the grand position of whoever thought this was HN worthy.
I don't know. Maybe it's beyond us all, and the OP has some insight as to how the whole GITMO situation can be solved with functional programming and 'high-availability clustering solutions', and he's just trying to nudge us into finding the solution.
> But, then again, civil liberties are a set of issues that can broadly affect us all
If HN's front page were open to anything and everything, and links were voted for based on their importance in the real world, the actual Hacker News content would be completely buried. The real world is far more important than most of what's on Hacker News, so paradoxically, if we want to maintain the quality and focus of HN, real world articles like this need to be excluded, even if we all agree they are very important.
The entire process of "approving" articles is democratic. The community of users decides what is interesting enough to appear on the front page. If you personally disagree that a particular article should be on the front page, well ... your only recourse is to flag it. If a democratic site is not what you want, then you don't want HN.
Actually, there are moderators who can and do kill stories, more or less according to the guidelines ( http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). If a completely democratic site is what you want, you want reddit.
What people find puzzling is that you didn't criticize the submission of the (political) article to HN in a new comment, or even in a reply to the top comment, but rather a in reply to a very specific viewpoint.
I didn't downvote you because I didn't agree with you (even though I don't), but because your comment is underspecified, un-argumented, and thus without any value.
> That said, we are not only Gitmo, and we actually do a lot of good things for the world.
Indeed, it is not just Gitmo, if only, and it's not just the US. Lots of EU governments are complicit in the whole rendition (what a word, kidnapping would be the appropriate term) program as well and there are/were more places in the world where people are being held without any sort of process, to be tortured and disposed of, either by killing them or by turning them loose years later without even an idea of who their captors were.
But those other countries do not claim moral high ground in the same way the US does on so many other issues, or claim to lead the world with respect to values such as freedom and democracy (of which the right to a fair trial can be considered a part).
From the time I spent in the USA I think there are at least two parts to this. There is a certain degree of triumphalism based on the outcomes of the Second World War and Cold War but more interestingly (or perhaps importantly) it is used to convey a sense of optimism and foster nationalism that is targeted at immigrants and intended to get them all pulling in the same direction. Nobody wants to move to a country and hear "Welcome, but it is probably as crap here as the place where you came from".
I have lived in the US for my whole life, and there definitely is an Exceptionalist doctrine, particularly among the Republican party. However, the ideas of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny go back much farther than WWII, all the way to the Puritan ideas of "civilizing" Native Americans to "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!" to Roosevelt's imperialism and on. It's so ingrained in our national history that it's barely even questioned (any surprise why there has never truly been a viable Socialist movement in America?).
Your point about immigrants is interesting, though I'm not really in a position to comment on it. I can tell you, though, that a good portion of the US is very hostile to immigrants, and we have had a history of hostility (take a look at the Chinese Exclusion Act, for an extreme example). Our current political discourse is also very anti-immigrant, too, and the path to citizenship is very lengthy and difficult.
That is patently false. I'm Greek, and I don't know any Greek (except maybe some right-wing fascists) who believes that their country was the best. Mindsets range from "it's shit" to "it might not be great, but it's my country".
Seeing Americans in movies go "best country in the world!" sounds absurd to us, and "you can't do this to me, I'm an American" sounds ludicrous.
The fact that everyone considers their country to be the best really seems to me like an American generalization. I've lived in the UK and I've had friends from a multitude of countries, and not one of them considers their country to be the best, unlike my American friends.
Everyone in Greece believes that our country was the best ever. How many times have you heard something along the lines "when we used to have civilization they were eating from the trees".
We believe in a common heritage and we think that because our ancestors were pioneers in so many aspects, from mathematics to theater and from philosophy to commerce that the whole world owes us some (actually a lot) respect.
The mindset you're referring to is true but applies to the state. We all thing that the government in particular and the state in general is crap but as far as we're concerned as individuals or as a nation we walk in the footsteps of our glorious ancestors.
And it's exactly this mindset which have led to our recent problems, which are not only financial as many believe. If you keep thinking that you are someone special there's no reason to change anything.
> Everyone in Greece believes that our country was the best ever. How many times have you heard something along the lines "when we used to have civilization they were eating from the trees".
That doesn't follow. The fact that some people say "we were civilized before you" doesn't mean they think it's the best country in the world. Not to mention that nobody even really says that, unless they're looking for a cheap insult. It's the equivalent to the American "we'll bomb the shit out of you".
I think the history of Europe has resulted in a lot of Europe knowing how much evil can and has been done under the banner of 'my country is the best in the world', and rightly becoming very skeptical about that kind of attitude.
> Seeing Americans in movies go "best country in the world!" sounds absurd to us
That sounds absurd to most Americans too. I've only heard that kind of rhetoric spoken by politicians, and it's definitely not a view most of us espouse.
There are a large number of Americans who believe the U.S. has the most powerful military in the world, and there are a sizeable number of Americans who believe that the U.S. provides the most opportunity for poor people to become rich through hard work (the "American dream"), but there are at least as many Americans who disagree with both, and I've never heard anyone in real life state that the U.S. is categorically "the best country in the world." Interestingly, I think it's safe to say that almost all Americans hold one view in common: no one likes the central government. That might be true in most democratic countries--I wouldn't know. But I don't think I've ever in my life heard an American state that they were satisfied with the government.
Hmm, I think that we probably don't know the sort of people who would consider their countries the best in the world, but I have a feeling that there's a larger percentage of those in the US (think Bible belt) than in Europe. I imagine that this is localized, though, as there are people in Greece who are all Golden-Dawn fascist-patriots too. They're seen as uneducated caricatures, which I imagine is how their American counterparts are also seen there.
Your statements have way more to do with your personal views then any facts.
As a person that lives in the Bible Belt, I can tell you that a significant number of folks that do not think America is the best. Many do believe it was at one time, but some of the strongest critics are in the Bible Belt now. The Tea Party movment, while arguably misguided, is a great example of that.
In EU, a number of ministers have been disgraced enough to be thrown out of politics when their cooperation with USA "extraordinary rendition" came known.
Where is the outrage in USA about Gitmo - which high-ranking officials have resigned in shame (or been thrown out for being shameless) about keeping these torture centers?
Sure, and some countries had their own Gitmos. The UK had hunger strikes and imprisonment without trial during their own civil war in Northern Ireland.
It's not as black and white as "USA bad, EU good".
I'm not aiming at "USA bad, EU good" - I'm aiming at "Gitmo bad, please fix NOW". Whatever was in earlier years, now there doesn't seem to be any justification whatsoever in keeping it.
Not sure you are right there, speaking as a Brit. Torture was used on internees, as detailed in the book Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain. I believe that torture also took place in Guantanamo, but I don't know whether it was worse. (Black prisons in other places like Baghram are another matter.)
In any case, in Guantanamo, the detention without trial is almost worse and more disgraceful than the torture. How can the democracies hold our heads up if this is how we behave?
The British didn't do forced feeding, but I'd hardly say it was great. As well as hunger strikes the prisoners also protested wearing prison uniforms. So the staff didn't empty their toilets. The prisoners smeared their feces on the walls. I'd recommend the film Hunger, it's a bit raw.
I believe that the inhumane treatment that went on in UK/NI was not systemic but a result of individuals acting of their own accord. Guantanamo Bay was chosen to locate the camp in order to allow these kinds of things to go on because American law does not apply there.
I was talking about that particular hunger strike in the 80s. Many died who didn't get force fed. That's not to say they never did it, nor will ever again, I was merely comparing that hunger strike to the one in the article.
I do think a lot of the Northern Ireland stuff was institutional. Gerry-mandering of election results, police oppression, etc.
Why da faq are you arguing on this nitty gritty of UK? US cannot justify gitmo just on the basis of something that UK did sometime back. You cant change what UK did, let it be. Every country has its heritage, both contributions and black spots.
Your parallel is off. Ireland itself was the "war" zone,
which would be analogous to the US black sites in
Afghanistan. You don't want the comparison.
And civil liberties in the mainland were nowhere
near as bad as this stupid war on terror.
The UK had internment without trial in the 1970s.
The hunger strike episode was in the 1980s, and was
started by people who had been tried and convicted.
Not people being "rendered" illegally from other
countries and certainly not random people handed in
for bounty who never received trial.
Finally, the internment episode, which shows the
UK in the worst light, is documented in this link
in Wikipedia:
The idea with terrorism against democracies is to scare the living daylight out of voters in a country. The politicians in those democracies want to win the next election do everything to stop the terror.
Afaik, most every democracy that had a serious terrorist problem over years threw out the law book -- UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, USA, etc.
It is a reaction built into democracy, if you have a better way of organizing society that is well tested, please tell me. (That "well tested" is critical; failure modes for testing systems often kills millions of people.)
"Afaik, most every democracy that had a serious terrorist problem over years threw out the law book -- UK, Germany, Israel, Spain, USA, etc." ...
Can you precise?
I can talk about something I know. I'm french. France got problem with islamic terrorism in the 90's. France is having problem with terrorism for the last 10 years. France has done two wars in the last 3 years (Lybia, Mali and still do stuff in Afganistan). My country is not the best country in the world but we did not end up with some terrible thing like Guantanamo ... I would say the same about many others european countries and it should be the same for USA. If you believe in human rights and dignity, what ever enemy you have to fight, you should not forget the values you are fighting for.
"I'm french.... My country is not the best country in the world but we did not end up with some terrible thing like Guantanamo"
Let me preface this by saying I'm a big fan of France. In fact, I think France was a good ally recommending caution with Iraq (precisely because they had the most recent experience with fighting a counter-insurgency in an Arab country).
But I take exception with your claim that France didn't end up with Gitmo.
Read 'A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962'. France pretty much invented torturing arab terrorists.
You are totally right. In the 20th century, France committed ugly things as well. In my previous post, I was talking about the recent period but Algeria is a good example what should be avoid. It's still a sensitive topic here, even 50 years after. I think it makes lose credibility and damage the soul of a country when this kind of episode happen. It's what our countries should avoid.
afaik, India - which is one of the largest democracies in the world follows the legal process in almost all the terror related cases. The fact that they try to adapt their laws to keep up with terrorism is a different story.
Yeah, India is weird. But a democracy with that kind of fraction of the population in total poverty (not to mention the corruption) is not going to react like others.
France, as someone else noted, is also different. My model do seem to work for Europe (afaik re GB, Spain, Italy, Germany.)
That was one lone crazy person. Are there other members of Breivik's gang out there? Totally different from an organisation of many people (possibly growing).
The IRA were bombing Britain all the time. There are still no trash cans in the London subway system today; they were taken out because the IRA might leave bombs in them.
The IRA even hit Downing Street and one of Thathcer's political conferences.
There might have been stepped up security in Northern Ireland itself, but security in London during that period was far less than during this stupid "War on Terror", and there weren't all these stupid "anti-terror" laws. The regular police didn't even carry guns back then.
Thatcher tried to use a regulation banning the voices of Sinn Fein from being put on air because they were advocating terror. The BBC just played the footage and used voice-over artists to say their words.
And this was how 80's Britain responded to the IRA, which was a large and well funded organization.
So I have an existence proof that you don't have to turn into a police state as a response to terrorism, because
I grew up in a country that chose another option.
For the last time in the 80s it did not work like you are implying.
During the "War on Terror" an old man and anti-Nazi
RAF veteran was arrested under "anti-terror" laws
for holding an anti-Blair placard at a demonstration.
During the IRA years, well ... Find me an example
of "security" that egregious during the period
I mentioned, I double dog dare you.
Stuff was blowing up all the time but the people
simply did not get all paranoid. Business as usual.
By the way, your wiki link refers to laws that were
put in place in the 70s. If I recall correctly,
Britain tried full scale internment in the 70s and got
bitch slapped in court by Ireland, and then stopped.
That may be the reason Britain was acting in a saner
way in the 80s, but I wasn't debating the history of it.
I was simply saying that 80s Britain was an existence
proof of a society not responding to terrorism by
turning into a police state. The IRA terrorism hadn't
stopped in the 70s, by the way - it continued into the
90s making it far longer-lasting than Afghanistan.
And finally, the topic was Guantanamo Bay, where people
have been held without trial for more than a decade.
You are trying to compare that to British emergency powers that held people for one week?
You can post that wikipedia page a fifth and sixth time, it still won't change anything. It will just make you look stupider and more of a liar.
>>It will just make you look stupider and more of a liar.
My claim was:
The idea with terrorism against democracies is to scare the living daylight out of voters in a country. The politicians in those democracies want to win the next election do everything to stop the terror.
Afaik, most every democracy that had a serious terrorist problem over years threw out the law book [...]
You argue that the Brits of the 1980s weren't that scared, Blitz-style. That might be true (your personal experience isn't that big support) -- but it is not relevant for my point, which is about politicians' reactions to scared civilians.
But you know that, troll.
For British response: I posted a link to the law above. Google site:hrw.org yourself, for more -- it was definitely harsher than pure criminality would need.
Congrats troll, you got another answer. Now you can lie more about what I wrote, to see if you get another...
I don't need to lie about what you wrote, you are doing that yourself.
Firstly, you come out with this stuff whenever an even tangentially related topic comes up on HN. So you are not making an observation about political science, you are engaging in advocacy. You are saying "Hooray for throwing out the rule book! That keeps us safe and stops the towelhead terrorists!". Like you did here: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=4474143
Secondly, you are engaging in the no true scotsman fallacy whenever I give a counterexample. Breivik wasn't true terrorism because he was just one guy. Well that's irrelevant. The size and scale of any terrorist attack ever made up to now has been insignificant next to the damage to civil liberties from "security" or even to the death toll from road accidents. The difference is whether the population get hysterical, as you are advocating, or maintain their sense of proportion, as I am advocating. Marinus Van Der Lubbe was also just one guy, but we got Hitler and the Nazis being given emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag fire, because the Germans in the 30s ran around screaming about how the scary, scary legions of communist barbarians (well funded by their Russian backers) were a serious threat to all of civilization, just like you keep screaming about how the scary, scary legions of islamist barbarians (well funded by their oil-sheikh backers) are a serious threat to all of civilization.
Well we don't have to treat this crap as natural. Any sane society, like the Norwegians today and unlike the Germans in the 30s, can just refuse to be scared, and put checks and balances in place to curb the politicians, like the European courts curbed the British government.
Politicians taking away liberties under the excuse of "security" is the oldest fraud in the book, as anyone can see from Julius Caesar's comments on Sulla. Nobody who grew up in a country with functioning schools and books has any excuse for not knowing better.
However, these are white people, so when they blow something up they are just "one lone crazy person".
When 19 brown people bring down a couple of trade towers, suddenly it becomes "totally different"?
To be consistent with your logic, the Clinton administration should have carpet bombed Elohim City and suspended human rights in Oklahoma, including keeping innocent people locked up without trial, until they got every last Klan nut/ Church nut/Gun nut out there.
Breivik was a single crazy -- not a set of organized terror groups with thousands of members (and hundreds of millions of dollars in finances) which regularly execute complex simultaneous bombings, etc, etc.
That makes the existing alQ 2001 at least a million times larger problem than Breivik in his cell 2013.
AGAIN, Breivik is only a member of a group in his own mind -- and in your mind. (I seriously wonder if there are more similarities.)
Usually at this point, I write "But you know that you're arguing nonsensically, troll".
I can't do that in your case, so instead:
I hope you're just a sad loser failing to troll and not such a hatemonger that you make bad arguments just to get some support for your conspiracies.
You assert Breivik was a single crazy but you ignore the fact that his kahanist buddies in outfits like the JDL are well funded organized groups.
You also ignore that in terms of the domestic terror threat, according to the FBI organized jewish loons are a larger threat than yemeni moslem loons - and that jewish loons aren't being locked up indefinitely
You also ignore that when the US was in a similar situation, during the McVeigh episode, the US did not respond towards the militiamen by locking them up without trial. They used normal law enforcement procedures. And McVeigh was not a lone wolf. That lot are organized and well funded
But if you didn't ignore these parallels, you'd be forced to see that there is an alternative called "the rule of law". And you wouldn't like that. You prefer the policy "lock up the towelheads and throw away the key".
1. Al Qaeda can be described as 19 brown people -- not thousands of members (and hundreds of millions in finances) with repeated attempts at mass murder through terrorism.
2. If the Western world wasn't racist -- Breivik should have gotten as much attention as al Q, despite his whole gang (he, himself) being in jail.
3. This attention of Breivik is merited because: Two groups of crazies in USA, which did some terror a few decades ago, might have similar opinions as Breivik (according to you).
(One of those groups even have a different religion and the other group's members could hardly find Norway on a map.)
I'm sorry, my position is still that you're either a really pathetic troll or some sick hatemonger. But I did stop laughing, your existence is too depressing.
And no, Al Qaeda is not some James-Bond baddy organization with hundreds of millions in finances, you pulled that out of your ass.
Al Qaeda is a common name used by lots of different little local terrorist groups to make themselves seem menacing.
eg if the Al Shabab boys in Somalia want to make themselves seem badass, they call themselves "Al Qaeda in Somalia"
But facts don't matter to you because you are a complete fraud.
So we'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and pretend that you are talking sense. We'll pretend that you were referring to Osama Bin Laden's organization in 2001. His actual organization, not the one in your fever dreams.
That organization had hardly any people outside of Afghanistan. And didn't use much money. Their entire
budget for the attack was 19 air tickets and some box
cutters.
The facts about the attack are also that it was small.
Large for a terrorist attack, but small in the grand
scale of things. 2 or 3 buildings knocked down, and about
3000 people killed.
We'll throw in the US embassy bombings and the attack on
the USS Cole as well.
And you are saying this grand total justifies extraordinary
rendition, suspension of habeas corpus and the Geneva
conventions, the Patriot act etc etc etc. while the Korean war didn't?
Mao's China and Kim Il Sung's Korea put together, with
their legions of commandos (and now their nukes) were a threat.
Are you trying to say a few thousand suicide bombers
are a bigger threat? Such a bigger threat that we have
to give up civil liberties for them that we did NOT have
to give up when at war with China?
I skimmed enough to see that you didn't argue against my description of your position.
So I take it the description was accurate.
I note that you lie about what I wrote, which was: All (functioning) democracies tend to ignore human rights and laws when its citizens are threatened with terrorism.
I removed the rest and references. You phantasize something without me having to help anyway...
No you idiot. I was replying to rmc when he said Breivik was a lone nut job. I gave another example of McVeigh, who was definitely not a lone nut job, and pointed out that the same rule applies. And so the McVeigh example invalidates rmc's point by itself. Are you really that stupid that you keep missing the point?
You suggested that others should do as Norway did, re Breivik.
So, as usual, it was pointed out to you that Norway was a very different situation since Breivik was in jail, there is no big organisation that promise more terror.
Then you went troll and described 9/11 as "19 brown people" and started talking about unrelated crazies on another continent of Breivik -- decades earlier.
Edit: That you lie about what you wrote yourself means that you're an unusually sad troll and not a mental case. That makes me happy, believe it or not. Please get a life instead. If you go to a gym/psychologist it should be ok in the end.
No, I really don't know any better way but this way that you are supposedly telling others to accept as 'al right' is not a a way at all. It's not even democracy.
And if you keep doing[1] this - detaining innocents and keeping them in the vacuum for years without a trial and without letting them know what is their crime, if tall; and killing hundreds of children in one drone strike(even though your country's Sec.OS was against it) then you have got two clear choices -
(1). Either wipe out all those innocents, their supporters, family and non-innocents who get another reason(or show it to innocents) to hit you back. This is already happening in my own country on the northern/top tip - for decades.
(2). Or be ready for more aggressive attacks when you are no longer in a position to drone the shit out of entire villages of children and women at your whims(very soon). Well, in this case you might as well be looking for the collective wipe out. you and me together get perished in the shit that we let grow and multiply.
On a more gory(violence ahead) note I'll give a very far fetched but possible example - you might find your, on pre-college RTW trip, teenage son's neck slit by some disgruntled, frustrated, suicidal, lost kid who had lost his father or maybe entire family just the way above mentioned - only because he was born in the wrong geography. Of course your RTW kid was innocent too; as innocent as the kid who struck the blade!
It's a lot worse than the time of colonization, damn it!
Here this you can be me, you, your CIA top boss or just anyone.
[1]. By keep doing I want to say keep on accepting as a world citizen.
Did you mean were? No, they were not. A drone strike is not a shot on a dart board by a marksman so they don't need to.
>>hundreds in one strike>>
My mistake. I was angry and I just mentioned it in flow - I originally wanted to portray remote strikes in general. But drone strike are not sniper shots either! Can I humbly ask you to go here[1] and you might be enlightened http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan
>>I stopped reading.
I believe that you've stopped reading - literally, especially after reading your last sentence.
Really? I've never once, despite living in the EU for my entire life (in various countries), heard anyone claim the country they live is anything like "the land of the free".
Every country has people in it believing that, and songs accordingly. It is called nationalism, which is more common in some countries then others. If you would say those thinks over here, people would suspect you being a nazi.
This "America is the greatest country on earth"-slogan is pretty specific for the USA. It is so typical that it became a klischee, we call it "american pathos". It is the same category like beauty queens wishing world peace in a country leading two wars. It is the movie independence day with a american president being a jet fighter fighting aliens and saving the world, once again, and us thinking that this fits to the image the USA has of itself. It is right-wing nationalism as a political party (republicans) and 24h on tv (Fox News). It is "god bless america".
And there are those american politicians saying things like "we are the greatest country in the world" and "the land of the free". No other country has that, at least no democratic one and not with the same prevalence, to my knowing.
It is hybris, because in many objective ways, america is the worst countries in the world. Poverty, education, leading wars, prison system, death sentences, amount of guns per capita, killing and abduction of foreign civilians, torture of prisoners, broken democratic system, religious fanatism. No other country fails in so many ways so high, not even your beloved rogue states.
PS: Doesn't mean there are only bad parts, there are even great ones.
PPS: Your examples, "mother of all parliaments" and the tyranny-overthrowal in France, relates to historical events and facts. That is something else than a broad generic claim.
(As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)
You say this is hubris, but you fail to mention that in many if not more objective ways America is the greatest country in the world. It has the largest amount of wealthy people, the largest amount of educated people, it has freed an entire continent of war, its justice system covers and protects an enormous amount of people, it holds individual rights to a very high standard, it is the largest true democracy in the world.
Then we haven't even mentioned the results of that great economy it has. It presents the world with a dazzling amount of technological progress, from computers to medicine. The fruits of american science have increased the quality of life and longetivity of a vast majority of people on this planet.
There's some subjective stuff too. It has in my opinion the greatest cultural industry, it produces the most impressive books, movies, music, paintings, whatever you like you're bound to find an expert in the US.
Yes guantanamo bay is a black mark on the US's grey slate, but it doesn't immediately disqualify it as a great state of this world.
Just as a short note: Sure, you are not wrong. I tried to mention that viewpoint with my PS - i sure don't condemn the whole USA.
One could argue about specifics. I agree more with your subjective part - i like many american movies and series, but i would disagree with the high standards of individual rights (that was maybe true in the period after the communist-hunt and before 9/11, though) and the true democracy (for one, a true democracy in a literal meaning, according to my education, is a direct one, and the usa has many issues with its democracy like the needed money for becoming a successful candidate to qualify as a true democracy in the strictes sense, even if we count a non-direct one as such).
> (As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)
Why would you do that? For real now. It is highly unlikely that exactly the country one comes from is the greatest, bestestest, whatever, in total or only in any way.
>> (As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)
As another dutch person, I don't agree with that. This isn't the greatest country overall by any stretch of the imagination. The problem is that for every axis that you come up with some things will be better, others will be worse. No country wins on all points.
>> (As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)
>Why would you do that? For real now. It is highly unlikely that exactly the country one comes from is the greatest, bestestest, whatever, in total or only in any way.
No need to be so rational. I happen to have grown up in a way that's enabled by only a few countries in the world for which I am extremely grateful. I am sure you could be as happy in any other country.
> (As a Dutch person I believe The Netherlands is the greatest country of the world)
Uhm, really? As another Dutch person I now suspect you to be a member of some extreme rightwing ideology (PVV?) because no sane Dutch person I've ever known would say such an absurd thing.
Then you have a naive view of the world around you. Many things suck in other countries that you just don't notice in The Netherlands.
Also, viewing your country as great has nothing to do with rightwing ideology. I do not for a second think that past immigration laws have done anything to degrade The Netherlands as a great country.
Also, immigration laws (PVV's main issue) have nothing to do with rightwing ideology, it is merely associated with it due to conservationists often being right wing. Hitler for example was famous for his dislike of immigrants and also was a leftist.
Also, please don't post dumb assumptions over other peoples ideologies on public websites..
Sorry, random rambling on the internet doesn't count.
The nsdap had a left, socialist wing. Most of the members of that wing were executed, which is a good indicatior on how much Hitler himself agreed with them. He himself didn't had many political views one could describe as left, that there are similarities in the methods is mainly a coincidence. Your linked article is plainly wrong in that regard, the nationalization of industries for example didn't really happen after the Kapital agreed to cooperate (and ideologically, nationalization of industries in a facist regime is something else entirely than in a communist one).
You could've just said, "Hitler was not left, despite being in a nationalist socialist party he focused mainly on national goals and left the capitalists for what they were." My german is not so good, so I read the wikipedia article on the history of the socialist part of the nsdap and it seems you are right, there was not much of a leftist in him.
This is congruent with my observations as well. In my experience, Europeans do see the whole "God bless America" thing as ridiculously nationalistic, the same way many Americans do (cf Parker and Stone's Team America (is that the name?)).
And most Americans see the whole "monarchy" thing as ridiculously anachronistic with kings, queens, dukes, grand dukes, etc. and aristocracy of any kind as having no place in the modern world.
What is a "klischee"? Wherever you were educated can't have been much better than the US, which has the worst education system in the world (according to you). I'm sure the US also has the worst poverty in the world, the worst prison system in the world, the most killing and abduction of foreign civilians in the world, the most torture of its prisoners, but could you back that up with some sources or some rational thought?
Sadly i can't downvote yet. So i will write that as text: No, as you merged two ad hominem attacks into your comment, I won't discuss anything with you.
No, not at all. And many rightly recognize that "best" is an absurd term to apply to a country.
What people will say is, "This country is the best for me" or "We're not perfect, but I love it" or "We have our ups and downs, but I'm proud to be here." Often people will say, "My country is the best" in the same way they say, "My wife is the best."
When I came to the US I was shocked at how many people openly, earnestly, unconditionally claim America is the best, the greatest, #1, etc. "On any objective scale, especially morally, America is the unqualified best." It's crazy.
in a post imperialist, post empire Europe we've grown beyond needing to swing our dicks around in a pissing contest. Some countries more than others it's true, but generally speaking there are better things to do than spend our time claiming our particular demesne in superior to all others.
And yet you're not post monarchy or aristocracy, so you haven't grown beyond needing to give people titles of duke and count and whatnot based on their birth.
I don't know of another country that has it quite so bad. I know of nowhere else in the western world where people fly flags or drape themselves in the flag with anything like the regularity of the US.
It really sticks out compared to everywhere else I've been, and I've travelled to/in 30+ countries now.
We Americans suffer from flag inflation. We mostly don't even notice them anymore, so people have to put bigger and bigger flags to prove how patriotic they are. I was at a baseball game last weekend and only noticed midway through how many (and how obnoxiously prominent) the flags were. It's silly.
OTOH, many immigrants fly the flags of their home countries, I guess as a sort of badge of identity. For whatever reason, that's always seemed less ridiculous to me.
Another thing I've noticed from US TV & films (so it might not actually be true), is how it only seems to be the US flag that is flown. Here it's not uncommon to see flags from lots of countries. Only governmental buildings would "only fly the local flag".
In my experience, we Canadians fly our national flag and wear flag-themed garb much, much more than Americans. Even more than in Texas, where people usually fly the American flag because they think it'd be rude to fly the Texas flag solo.
I suspect this Canadian flag-waving has more to do with our insecurities than it does with our comparative level of patriotism - we're not all that different from Americans, so we go out of our way to emphasize what differences we do have.
I'll admit I've not spent much time in Canada. Most of the time I did spend was driving along the top of lake Ontario and then back into the US via Niagara. Most of the flags I saw there were British!
Fascinating. I'm Canadian too and have made similar observations, yet was surprised to read what you wrote. Our self-image is so strongly one of not being nationalistic that we're for the most part unconscious of this behaviour. Most Canadians would react to your comparison to Texas as an obvious joke or a weird paradox.
Australia, believe it or not, is actually pretty bad in this regard. The amount of xenophobia disguised as "patriotism" is pretty eye opening (well at least for me). I haven't travelled through the USA though, but Australia definitely was a shock.
I know Aus has more than a few issues surrounding xenophobia and race but... I lived in Perth for two years and spent six months on the road around the country. Despite the fashion for Southern Cross tattoos, it comes nowhere close to the US for sheer number of flags. I never noticed flag poles and flags in people's front gardens (for example) like I saw in Texas.
Further, American Exceptionalism manifests itself entirely differently than other countries'. America sees its own as a right or even mandate to "spread liberty and freedom" to the world. The parent states the following:
>But those other countries do not claim moral high ground in the same way the US does on so many other issues, or claim to lead the world with respect to values such as freedom and democracy
This is effectively the definition of America's brand of Exceptionalism and it is that to which I was referring.
It is a far cry from simple nationalism or "thinking one's country is the best".
I've been following the advice of another front-page story (don't follow the news) for a while now so I'm really curious which / how EU governments are complicit in this. Do you have some pointers for more information on that?
One place to start is the Wikipedia article about the subject. I do not know how accurate the sections about all countries are but the section about Sweden seems correct (we used to do renditions until it was stopped in 2006 after the UN called us out on having violated the torture ban).
> not that McCain would have ever gotten it instead!
How are you so sure of that? McCain's neither a saint nor a philosopher-king: his personal narcissism seems to rival Obama's, and he often seems to be successfully flattered and managed by those around him. But he erratically takes stands on principle, and he also has personal experience of both torture and prolonged imprisonment. And in fact he took an anti-torture position which, while it wasn't absolute, was well out ahead of other Congressmen and presidential candidates and was hardly calculated to win votes.
There's also the fact that whatever about McCain's personal inclinations, he or any other Republican president would have been under much sharper pressure from others on the issue. The people and institutions who were shouting so much about detention and torture and drone strikes under Bush and then became silent or muted under Obama (or indeed rushed to bestow on him a Nobel Peace Prize) would have continued shouting under McCain.
I realize that the view of Obama as a tremendous narcissist has become a right-wing meme, but it seems so odd (kind of like the related view that he's a know-nothing who can't speak without a teleprompter, though that one seems to have died down since the election). I'm curious: how did the narcissism meme get started, and what evidence is cited for it, other than that major politicians tend to have major egos?
I'm not trying to make a political point. I don't follow the sources on this and would like someone to explain to me how the people who believe this came to believe it and what arguments they advance for it.
(p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)
The teleprompter thing started to die once the entire field of Republican candidates was winnowed down to the single non-crazy one who was perfectly happy to use a teleprompter.
Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, Hermann Cain. Rick Santorum wanted to ban them. Etc.
All with predictable results. This isn't to say they never used teleprompters in their life; just that when they were running for the nomination, it was a useful cudgel to bash Obama and implicitly Mitt. That's why they were known as pretty gaffe-prone candidates.
Seriously? Obama's ego really does give appear to be at the upper, Blair/Sarkozy end of the big-politician scale. I could consider an argument that appearances are deceiving here; but no-one with two eyes could look at Obama's personal background and career to date and fail to see how it might, at least, leave someone else with the impression that Obama's unusually prone to feel the world as revolving around him.
> (p.s. I think you may have misread the GP, who meant that McCain would not have gotten their vote instead of Obama.)
The real reason there would have been a chance under McCain is that the press, the Democrats in the Congress, and rights groups currently co-opted by the current administration would be all over his ass to close it.
Instead we have a deafening silence from all these groups that used to squawk daily about Gitmo and other government abuses while the other guy was in office.
Sure. As I think I made clear, I would have little confidence in McCain's willingness to reliably do the right thing in any given situation. (Taking it as read for the moment that agreeing to bring Guantanamo detainees to the US would be the right thing at this point.) But with the combination of stronger external pressure, (maybe) more cooperative Congressional Republicans, and whatever McCain might have felt like doing once President, it seems possible (very far from assured) that he might have made more progress down the military-tribunals route than Obama has made down either that or the US-trials route. (It would be harder to see McCain reversing his consistent opposition to US trials for the detainees.) The strongest reason to think otherwise would seem to be scepticism that anyone could really make the military-tribunal option work efficiently.
The problem is that to close Guantanamo, you need funding to a least move the prisoners to another facility. Introducing them to the justice system would require the same.
As every American should know, Congress holds the purse strings here and has denied said request. The President has no power here.
If the prisoners are ever released without being charged or tried (which won't happen because there's no evidence), they can each file a civil suit against the U.S. Government, each worth potentially hundreds of millions. I think this plays a role as well.
It's the equivalent of keeping the neighbor's daughter in your basement because letting her out would get you into so much trouble.
Gitmo is already shockingly illegal or dangerously unethical; I don't see any interest by the US government to end it and take some of the heat for that.
As an American I've come the same conclusion. But it is a cowardly conclusion. We need to take our medicine and correct the wrong-doings of Gitmo. I don't really care if it costs a couple of hundred million dollars, that's chump change compared to the federal budget.
If a guy like Nixon can get a pardon so that the country can move forward, then we can certainly do the same for whatever ahats are culpable for setting up Gitmo in the first place. Pardon the military and politicians responsible for their misguided patriotism and then start treating these unfortunate souls like humans again as one small step towards making the US live up to its lofty ideals again.
Using the bully pulpit costs political capital, and nobody in the President's party wants him to waste political capital on Gitmo rather than healthcare, the economy, etc.
Something like a quarter of Americans also think the President is a crypto-Muslim. In the Wall Street Journal, today, for UN ambassador John Bolton and Bush Admin. legal adviser John Yoo are arguing that the administration signed up to a UN treaty intended to curb the global arms trade is really a cover for destroying the 2nd amendment and confiscating Americans' guns.
I am, frankly, surprised that that nobody in the House has offered articles of impeachment so far. (checks) Well almost, but it died q uiet death in the House Judiciary committee: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.CON.RES.107:
This is one of those cases where only Nixon can go to China.
While I agree with you, can you think of a US president that hasn't committed an impeachable offence? We almost expect them (along with prime ministers, premiers, etc) to do rotten things, once in power. They are rarely held accountable for their crimes.
You have not charged them with any crimes for the past 10 years and have not put them on trials. The problem is not the location of the prison. The problem is you are shitting on Habeas corpus.
It seems unlikely that Congress micromanages the budget of the Department of Justice to the degree that it could not initiate prosecution of detainees in the civilian legal system. Whether that would be a reasonable solution is debatable, but it's certainly within the President's authority to attempt.
There's always the nuclear option: threaten to release the detainees if Congress doesn't provide funding for another solution.
This back and forth has happened many times. The Defense Appropriations bills that have passed Congress have forbid the President from using fund for any of these activities.
There is no nuclear option. Veto is not an option.
What people don't seem to understand is that this isn't a failure of democracy to act: this is what the American people want. We don't care that Guantanamo is open and we'd rather see it stay open than give these people a chance at a fair trial.
We are a government by the people, of the people, and the people have spoken.
this is false, FYI. Please reread the constitution. Sometimes it refers to citizens, sometimes it refers to people. The Bill of Rights applies to everyone.
The fundamental civil liberties protections of the Bill of Rights and Constitution apply to all “persons,” not just citizens. For example, every person in the United States has the right to due process and equal protection; to criminal proceedings that afford a right to counsel, a jury trial and freedom from double jeopardy; to freedom from cruel and unusual punishment; to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and to freedom of speech, religion and association.
The Bill of Rights only applies to "people" within the jurisdiction of the American government. The Constitution is not a document that has extraterritorial force of international extent.
Control in the physical military sense is not the same as legislative jurisdiction. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnson_v._Eisentrager. E.g. the U.S. may have had control of occupied Baghdad, but that doesn't mean Congress had legislative jurisdiction over Baghdad.
Now, the Supreme Court has decided that Congress has de facto legislative jurisdiction over Guantanamo (in an opinion comparing the historical treatment of Scotland, in which English habeas rights did not apply, to Ireland, in which they did): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boumediene_v._Bush.
Scalia's dissent was the most legally sensible: 'Justice Scalia added that the Court's majority "admits that it cannot determine whether the writ historically extended to aliens held abroad, and it concedes (necessarily) that Guantanamo Bay lies outside the sovereign territory of the United States."[27] Justice Scalia pointed out that Johnson v. Eisentrager (where the Supreme Court decided that U.S. courts had no jurisdiction over German war criminals held in a U.S.-administered German prison in China) "thus held—held beyond any doubt—that the Constitution does not ensure habeas for aliens held by the United States in areas over which our Government is not sovereign.'
But the Court stopped short of saying that foreigners in Guantanamo have the same habeas rights as U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, probably because of the strained nature of their conclusion that they had any habeas rights at all.
Given slavery was not abolished at the time of independence, it seems likely that the writers of the constitution did in fact not intend to apply rights to all humans as broadly as possible.
That's in the Declaration of Independence not the Constitution. The former is high prose. The latter is a legal document. As a legal document, it cannot purport to give rights to people outside of its jurisdiction.
The Constitution does not purport to give rights to anybody. It declares that certain things are rights and prohibits the US government from violating them.
You're confusing the declaration of independence, a fluff document, with the Constitution, a legal document. Fluffy language aside, in the Anglo-American tradition, rights derive from legal documents (or precedents), and the right to habeas corpus or a jury trial derives from the Constitution and is circumscribed the the territorial jurisdiction of the Constitution.
The Constitution details the authorities and powers that the government has. The government does not assume total power when it is dealing with non-citizens or operating overseas. The Supreme Court has ruled clearly on this in the past.
They would immediately try take legal action against the American administration through any and every international court available. Having been detained without sufficient evidence there is a case to answer, the US and their cohorts (let us not forget that several governments including ours in the UK have been shown to be complicit in rendition actions that deliberately circumvented international law) can't try ignore the issue with the "enemy combatants" and other such reasons without looking like complete hypocrites given how loud they shout when someone they care to defend is detained without what they consider to be sufficient evidence (Iran holding several naval officers for instance). Even more embarrassing: some of the people they are refusing to let go home to face/demand their own country's justice are American - they don't even want their own legal system anywhere near this.
tl;dr: Just letting them go would certainly not be cost free, financially or in terms of local and/or international reputation.
That doesn't make what's happening the right thing to do... Well, if we just summarily execute them, then we don't need to take care of them... It's the fiscally responsible thing to do. I mean, war crimes are war crimes.
I'm not arguing that it is right in any way - just that the "if we just X it won't require any cost/effort" was a slightly naive PoV. My wording may not have made that clear.
The interview in the story claims to be reported by the prisoner's lawyers. What prevents them from taking legal action now? What changes if their client is released?
By my understanding, their layers are pretty hamstrung. That they have them is something, but their arguments for presentation of evidence, fair trial, rights as stated in the Geneva convention, and so forth, are for the most part unsuccessful - usually falling to a simple response of "the national good" which comes back to the circular argument "present evidence of that risk to (inter)national interests", "we can't do that, it would be a risk to (inter)national interests".
Right now they still have "enemy combatant status" and are not in a position where they can push their defence any further or be helped by their own governments and/or legal systems (if said systems would in fact help: some would, some wouldn't). If they were freed without charge then they have a case for unfair detainment (where now any such claim will be replied to with "they haven't been charged yet, that might change") and if they were charged there would be something for them to try make a case against (where now it is someone's un-evidenced word against their's, neither side having much legal standing so the people holding the keys "win").
If they were sent home, very many of them would be instantly killed, imprisoned or worse. For many of them, Gitmo is probably a lot better than they'd be facing at home.
Let's not forget that this comment of yours is in a thread about a guy sitting in that very same place, _asking_ to get home whatever the price would be. So the whole article that spawned this thread shows a very different position.
That totally ignores my immediate 'citation needed' urges and my shock about this opinion.
And I responded to a comment which was simply saying "Just send them home". That can't be done for "them" all.
I believe there is a wide variation within those imprisoned: some are innocent and were captured by mistake or worse (e.g. rivals were turned in by jealous neighbours, or whatever), others are actually hardened fanatics. And it is very difficult to know who is what.
And since when is being a "hardened fanatic" a crime? As long as they're not otherwise engaged in criminally acting that out, who the fuck cares what they think? If there was any actually solid evidence for anything real against them, they wouldn't be in limbo, would they.
Then give them a choice to go home, and if they don't want to, grant them asylum in the US. There's no reason for them to be locked up in a quasi-jail just because it's unsafe for them to go home.
As far as I understand, this is quite a real problem: no country is willing to receive most of these prisoners, except countries to which the U.S. cannot reasonably send them. Public opinion in the U.S. is hostile towards accepting them as refugees. A few have been placed to Palau, because sending them home to China would be bad and Palau is in no position to refuse such a request. Is that fair? Hardly.
In the U.S., lots of people in principle like to close Gitmo but in practice want the prisoners go to somewhere else, not settle as their own neighbours.
Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp.
There is another option, keep them in Guantanamo but improve conditions to at least normal prison standards in the US. I can't believe that would be more expensive than maintaining their current regime.
Sounds like you are proposing that we ignore the fact that they never faced a legal proceeding, and just give them fluffier pillows while we hold them indefinitely.
This is not a situation where we should be outraged at a president breaking his promise (yawn), but a case of an executive order not being carried out.
Congress deserves as much or more blame for this situation. They've prevented the President from carrying out his intended solution to this problem. Without their support, he is powerless to release these people.
This is absolute nonsense. The US president, wrapping himself in the role of commander in chief, does just about anything he wants if it's even loosely connected to war or security, with or without congressional approval. Surveillance. Torture. Black sites. Assassination. Drone murders. Infinite detention. If he wanted Gitmo closed, he could close it. Congress won't give him the budget? Fine, he could order the closing as a military operation. He doesn't want to take the political heat. I voted for him (2008), but he is without testicular fortitude on this issue.
I don't see how his answer was naive. I think we've reached a low point as a people if believing an elected official will actually attempt to keep his campaign promises is naive.
On the other hand, it would be nice indeed if people understood the political process. Obama has attempted action on Gitmo (however long ago that was).
But, Congress has not only not supported closing down Gitmo and sending the prisoners "home" (to whatever home means), they have explicitly forbidden it in their defense appropriation bills going back for years.
And people here say that Obama should break the law he was elected to enforce this time, just not all the other times that the law is in their favor.
And either way, the first person he gives the direct order to break the law to will refuse to carry it out (since it's an unlawful order), and then that breakdown in command & control will be the end of Obama's Presidency. It must be nice being an HN commenter, there's a reason Obama's hair is rapidly turning gray.
Rescinding that executive order doesn't make magic happen. There is the process of closing down and what to do with the prisoners that matters. It's sounding like Congress is tying the President's hands by restricting his ability to use funds (funds that Congress authorizes) towards those goals. If you're in the US and you want this to happen, I would look towards your representatives in Congress, and research these bills.
This rings similar to the 'legalize marijuana' issue. Making it legal 'tomorrow' would be a massive undertaking because of all of the infrastructure that's in place with the assumption that it's illegal.
Sometimes decisions/actions seem 'easy' on the surface, while the devil is in the details.
I find it interesting that you referenced http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... at a time in the United States when two states have in fact legalized Marijuana.
I think this simply highlights the point that change for the better is possible if the people want it enough.
What does this mean for Gitmo? Could we apply the same sort of sidestep? I.E. a small forward-thinking community with a not terribly overworked prosecutor petitions to have them tried there? As I remember from back in 2009, the biggest issue was that our congresscritters were screaming "Not in my back yard!" in regards to the evil terrorists, which when you think about it from their perspective is quite a reasonable thing to do. Are there any places here in the U.S. that would actually take and try the Gitmo detainees? (gotta love Newspeak... prisoners)
| Are there any places here in the U.S.
| that would actually take and try the
| Gitmo detainees?
I imagine that they would be tried in Federal court, but I would be curious what the jurisdiction would be if the crimes were committed outside of the US.
Yet leaving it illegal is the problem we face on both counts. I dont see why youre bothering to state this nonsense in the form of an argument against doing the right thing. It would have been easier to do nothing in the first place yet here we bloody well are.
I would support you if you want to go after the people that made this happen, that said if you want to clean up the mess as it currently is, then you'll have to work out how to get it done. Complaining about how it shouldn't have happened in the first place doesn't translate into action now to remedy the situation.
It's in his comments on every appropriations bill. You just don't care.
Let's all be honest: we don't think about Guantanamo. When people bring it up we'll hem and haw and say, "gee, that's just terrible," but we don't give a shit. Take it out of the spotlight and it may as well not exist.
Yep, that's exactly it. When this link popped up on HN, I read the article and though "wow, that's horrible. Something should be done here!". But tomorrow my mind will be full of other concerns, and a Yemenite I don't know who has been detained without charge or trial for 10 years on a military base far away by a government that is not mine is simply not on my radar.
That might have something to do with the fact that we have problems to deal here. The prisoners at Guantanamo might seem like a bigger deal if we did not have millions of prisoners who were never tried by a jury in the USA. We might actually care about this particular Obama campaign promise if there were not so many other broken promises.
Yep. Most Americans have the attention span of a gnat. Plenty of us care, we just get distracted by other things. And that's the point really. The government wants us distracted. It's called Negative Liberty.
Most who read that article wil be outraged. They'll share it on FB. And forget it by Friday when the net big movie, sport event, or parade comes along.
In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison. The 90-6 Senate vote—paired with similar House action last week—was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.
That's from 2009, but it's been an ongoing problem with defense funding bills since then.
This section of the Wikipedia article does an excellent job of explaining President Obama's actions to close the detention camp, and how Congress interfered. They've made it impossible for the President to lawfully transfer the detainees to any US state or foreign country. There is realistically no way for the President to release them without being able to transfer them.
Move them to another facility on U.S. soil. And presumably hope the Supreme Court would then "force" his hand on moving them into the domestic judicial system. I will be snarky because it's late, and I'm annoyed this topic is on hn: President Obama loves nothing more than to vote "present".
>>>>>>>>I appreciate that there may be anger outs people in Gitmo, but they have every right to a trial I have.
It's really not that easy considering most people say these people should be covered under the Geneva Convention and given a military tribunal to determine their guilt. Unfortunately, the convention was really adopted for conventional warfare, not the sort of loosely organized terrorists we're currently fighting.
Also keep in mind a large percentage of these people who claim to be innocent have returned to the battlefield after being released from Gitmo:
"A declassified document made public Tuesday showed that up to 25% of all former detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, subsequently engaged in terrorism or insurgency"
>>>>>>As a country, in many ways we deserve the disdain directed at us.
No, not really. Considering when something bad happens anywhere in the world, nobody calls Canada, nobody calls Turkey, nobody calls Sweden. They call us to fix it. They call us to send billions in aid. They call us to take care of their crazy saber rattling neighbors. You think we deserve the disdain, but can you imagine the world without the billions in aid, without all the military aid we give other countries?
1. I would "return to the battlefield" too after being treated like they are, even if i had done nothing before. What makes you think Gitmo is not the cause?
2. If the convention is outdated, update it. It's not like the US is pushing the Hague and others to convene treaty proceedings to get this done.
Until the US actually takes any steps to try to fix this "problem", i take it as just a BS excuse.
3. You have a very strange view of what happens, one I can only imagine is contributed to mainly by local media. They do in fact, call Canada, Turkey, Sweden, and others. These are rarely, if ever, unilateral actions. Due to some folks i'm friends with, i've actually occasionally traveled with some of these kinds of delegations, and I assure you, none of this is "better call big brother US to beat these guys up".
4. They would never declassify a document that shows them having been wrong until at least 20-25 years after the fact.
Be sure you figure out how to enforce it first, especially for those who kidnap kids and turn them into suicide bombers (apparently they give them a 'magic amulet' which they tell the children will protect them from the blast).
I don't think that we can change that. But what we can do is hold ourselves to a higher standard of decency and treat people the way we'd want to be treated.
The problem is that our ROE is seen as an act of weakness, not compassion.
Our ROE says not to shoot unarmed kids. So, the enemy puts suicide vests on kids and sends them at us.
Our ROE says not to shoot people who aren't carrying a weapon. So, they shoot at us, drop their weapon, and walk to the next building to do it again.
Our ROE says not to blow up a house if there are civilians inside. So they take a family hostage and shoot at us from upstairs.
My attitude is that we use these rules as a courtesy. We didn't bomb hospitals in WW2 because those hospitals weren't being used as shelter for soldiers. We didn't bomb orphanages because they didn't have IED factories in their basements. Today's enemy does that, and then people get butthurt when we blow up the orphanage. Well, stop putting bomb factories under there!
Laws of war only apply when both sides agree to abide by them.
The issue with Gitmo is that we're no treating others as we'd want to be treated. 10+ years with no proof/trial, simply because we've made up a new word "enemy combatant" to circumvent the Geneva Conventions... not exactly cool.
>>No, not really. Considering when something bad happens anywhere in the world, nobody calls Canada, nobody calls Turkey, nobody calls Sweden. They call us to fix it. They call us to send billions in aid. They call us to take care of their crazy saber rattling neighbors. You think we deserve the disdain, but can you imagine the world without the billions in aid, without all the military aid we give other countries?
Citation needed, please. There's a lot of countries and a lot of people outside the US, and the idea that they are all calling on the US to solve their political and international relations problems sounds a bit silly to me. Did you know France has had military operations Mali since 2012 without the advice, consent, or involvement of the US, for instance? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Mali_conflict_%282012%...)
"The United States remained the world's largest bilateral donor, obligating approximately $49.6 billion—$31.7 billion in economic assistance and $17.9 billion in military assistance. By comparison, the United States obligated $37.4 billion and $14.5 billion, respectively, in FY2010."
A 25% recidivism rate is pretty good considering that many might have gone to the "battlefield" as payback for their improper imprisonment. Also, it is disingenuous to conflate terrorism with insurgency as both have different motivations and "scope of battlefield."
So-called insurgents were only a threat to local presence of Americans and not interested in sticking overseas or be a part of a broader movement against America. Just because they are fighting for their country from their perspective doesn't make it right to say they are the same as terrorists.
You also have to take into account for the loss of goodwill and reputation across the world for hosting Gitmo; particularly when it has possibly radicalized more people simply by having something to point to when a terrorist recruiter propagandizes about the 'evilness of the US' and the merits of attacking us.
Just to compare, a quick google search shows that the U.S. recidivism was around 70%. It might have improved or not since the study period, but it does perspective on the issue.
A 25% recidivism rate is miniscule considering we have been told for forever that these prisoners, all of them, were the "worst of the worst".
But your general point is a good one: Is someone who joins a not-very-nice local militia really a terrorist just because US troops or lackeys happen to be nearby? The US gov't is playing too many words games IMO.
Here's an interesting thought experiment: Imagine you are Obama, newly elected president. Under what conditions would you reverse yourself and let Gitmo stand? What information would you have to become privy to that you weren't before in order for you to change your mind?
Great idea. Here's some ideas to toss around. Maybe..
- We cannot have a proper trial for these men because many were actually innocent but should we turn them loose now we would lose a huge amount of face (but whose face would be lost under an incoming president?)
- We cannot have a proper trial for these men because many were actually innocent but now we have turned them into such dangerous killers, that, given their freedom they would now pose a significant thread (it seems unlikely to me that untrained non-killers could've learnt the skills of trade craft while under this type of detention regime).
- We cannot have proper trial for these men because if we did then in the nature of an honest trial, certain secrets would come out and that can't be allowed.. (seems more plausible?)
I think you strongly misunderstand what drives the political system. You are nowhere near cynical enough ;)
There is no real good and bad anymore. Doing good and stopping bad is not what drives folks in DC.
I was once like this. I thought people in DC were, by and large, doing things for the right reasons, and they mostly just had better info than I did.
After living in DC for 13 years, and being privy to a lot of the inner workings of some of this stuff, I no longer believe that. I've seen how too much sausage is made.
I believe what you think would have been true once, but simply isn't anymore.
That isn't to say there aren't young, idealistic folks in government. There are plenty.
There just aren't any old, idealistic folks in power anymore ;)
This saddens me and I hope you are wrong. For 40 years DC was the center of my life. I was born there and raised in the suburbs (went away a couple of times for school). I worked in the defense industry a bit between degrees. I taught college there for a decade. I left the area ten years ago, and I found the political climate there nauseating when I left.
While I acknowledge that the population at large carries a spectrum of pathological traits, and perhaps DC tends to attract and keep those with certain types of pathologies, I still like to think that most people are trying to do the "right thing" but in situations that are enormously complex.
Back to my thought experiment: You are Obama. You truly believe that torture is horrible and wrong. Yet when you are briefed on our operations you learn that information obtained as allowed us to derail a few large scale terrorist attacks. Do you close it down? If you do and a bomb goes off at the World Series killing thousands, how would you feel?
First, almost anything can be prevented by the torturing, killing, or detaining of other people, as long as you involve enough people:
Kill all terrorists -> no more terrorist attacks
Torture all terrorists -> learn enough to prevent attacks.
Nuke entire country -> nobody left in that country to attack you
Detain everyone you ever find on a battlefield -> unable to get back to battlefield
Trying to apply some cost benefit to these mechanisms is certainly complex, as you say, but that actually makes it worse here:
None of these complex cost-benefit tradeoffs are at all changed by Gitmo being there. There is no material difference in these tradeoffs between a prisoner in Gitmo and a prisoner in the US other than the legal rights being afforded the prisoner.
Instead, they try to say "well, they are in gitmo for a reason". This is actually completely irrelevant to preventing the next terrorist attack. Either you need to torture them/deprive them/render them/whatever or you don't. The fact that they are in Gitmo does not change this.
The only thing closing down Gitmo or not closing down Gitmo does is allow certain folks to try to play fast and loose with the legal and political realities around us having a constitution and being a nation of laws.
As an example:
We find a guy. He may or may not have been complicit in terrorism (he was a driver for a bad person). He may know the location/time of the next terrorist attack.
Torturing him (or not), detaining him forever (or not) certainly presents complex tradeoffs. None of these tradeoffs change whether I put him in Gitmo or not.
The only thing putting him in Gitmo does is:
1. Often make us feel better
2. Allow you to try to deny him what would otherwise be various rights he would have if kept in the US
3. Keep him out of sight and out of mind, and enable you to more strongly control the public narrative about the guy.
As you can see, none of these are related to the complex tradeoffs involved in deciding what to do with them, only the legalities of those tradeoffs, and ability to convince the public of those tradeoffs. We should not play fast and loose with these legalities, we should be straightforward and clear, and accept the consequences.
So, if the argument is "well, if we close Gitmo, to get the same effect we'd have to make torture/deprivation/indefinite detention legal in some cases in the US" (which is what you seem to be saying), we've already got a problem, and it's not related to closing down Gitmo or not.
If we want to declare torture and indefinite detention is okay in certain cases, that should be a national discussion we have, because, as you said, it involves complex tradeoffs.
Right now, with Gitmo open, it enables a lot of folks to ignore having this national discussion, and thinking hard about which tradeoffs they are willing to accept.
This, of course, is why Gitmo is still open.
It's the only available compromise position between the two currently extreme sides around what it is okay to do to in the situations you posit that doesn't involve either of them really losing.
You present a reasoned argument. But I need to clarify a couple of things. In your first lines
almost anything can be prevented ... long as you involve enough people
I want to point out that I only mean prevention by obtaining actionable information, not the idea that by keeping a guy off of the street we keep that particular guy from doing something awful again.
Also, under your numbered list of The only thing putting him in Gitmo does you left off one that I think is important. You are actually telling the world that we won't play fair with terrorists. (This is also, I think, the point that a lot of people are debating: that, in fact, we should play fair and take some sort of moral high ground.) We're telling the players that we can be quite nasty too.
And I completely agree with you that having Gitmo open "enables a lot of folks to ignore having this national discussion" and this could be exactly why we do it. Also, the idea that if we do get the terrorist threat to a manageable place we can close it down and "wash our hands" of it without having changed our stance in an official way.
But mostly I wanted to say that I pretty much agree with closing Gitmo. The idea authority without oversight is dangerous. But, in all honesty, if I knew it was working, I'm not sure I could be the guy to close it either. But that would be the only reason to consider keeping it open, and I have no information either way.
If the US president can close Guantanamo over the objections of sabre rattling congressmen who keep doing local town halls where they tell their constituents "we lock the bad guys up forever", then it makes clear to those local folks that their congressman are actually pretty impotent.
There are plenty of "he wanted to close Guantanamo bay and let terrorists go, like Obama" commercials that aired during the election.
As the parent said, doing this to congressman, be they republican or blue dog democrat, would make him completely and totally ineffective in getting bills passed.
There is usually a broad difference between the posturing you hear about on TV, and the actual way they act in closed door meetings.
In one case, they have to appear that way to keep their constituents happy. By and large, congressmen are not stupid (or at least, not egregiously so), they are just good at acting.
If you do something that is going to seriously threaten their apparent power position, however, it will no longer be acting.
sabre rattling congressmen who keep doing local town halls where they tell their constituents "we lock the bad guys up forever"
That seems to imply that these same congressmen wouldn't be able to spin a 'US justice leads the world' story out of bringing terrorists to a fair trial? Maybe, but I'm still a little skeptical. Remember: some of these are the guys who convinced half the country that Iraq was behind 911. I think they would have no problem taking credit for solving a problem of injustice at long last, further "demonstrating that there is a real difference between us and the terrorists." And maybe blaming Obama for Gitmo being there in the first place.
That it's, among other things, what they wanted to hear to elect me, and that I'm elected now, and can't in any way be held accountable for idle promises, and that standing firm on that principle is more important to my handlers than a bunch of bleeding hearts.
The double standard is Constitutional. The Constitution was never contemplated to give rights to foreigners not on U.S. soil. Indeed, every society has different rules for "its people" versus "other people." It's one of the things that makes war possible.
> The Constitution was never contemplated to give rights to foreigners not on U.S. soil.
Or to anyone. The Constitution is supposed to limit what the federal government can do, not grant any rights at all. When it was written, the assumption was that those rights were already held.
The Constitution doesn't say who they're held by; the only reference to "right" in there is actually a place that calls out my error: it does grant one right, which is copyright/patent. Oddly.
A document that might indicate who rights were considered to be held by is the Declaration of Independence, but it says "all men", which I would take to mean every human. Obviously not all the signers viewed it that way, given that slavery was still permitted. Since the US didn't exist at the time when these rights were already viewed as being operative, though, I think we can safely exclude that they were intended to apply only to US citizens.
The Declaration of Independence has no legal significance. It is just a letter, and the prose is intended to be poetic (to justify violent revolution) rather than functional.
Your comment about the U.S. not existing shows a misunderstanding of the nature of the Constitution. The Constitution is essentially a contract outlining the delegation of powers to the federal government from the sovereign state governments. The rights therein were viewed as already operative, but not because they were viewed as rights intrinsic to humanity, but because they were rights already enjoyed by citizens of the several states. When the Constitution talks about "people" it is not talking about "people in general." It is talking about "the people"--the body politic of the several states which combined to form the union. Those are the people who have rights under the Constitution.
> The Declaration of Independence has no legal significance.
No disagreement there; I only brought it up as something that "might indicate" what the framers were thinking when they failed to grant any rights in the Constitution.
On the rest, I'm no constitutional scholar; you may well be right on how this was viewed then.
Don't waste time pushing the blame on Presidents, they're but sock puppets for Congress.
The real problem is the legislature. Fill Congress with enough third-party seats, and maybe, just maybe we can get out of this mess and take back our country from the filth that runs it right now.
> The double standard of what human rights mean if you are a US citizen and if you aren't makes me physically ill.
I also think that is profoundly unjust, and unfortunately it is not simply a question of being a US citizen or not: US citizens who are arab or muslim are more likely to be suspected of acts that could be considered to lie within the vague legal category of Terrorism. So it seems that non-muslim and non-arab people (whether US citizens or european citizens or otherwise) are less likely to be subjected to exceptional treatment, to be detained without trial or be killed in extra-judicial assasinations etc. It seems the divide is more on a racial/ethnic line than a US-citizenship line.
They found a Saudi who was a U.S. Citizen (born in Louisiana), fighting in Afghanistan, and took him to Guantanamo. The Supreme Court ordered him released, and the government complied.
Some people are not considered "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law". That is what I find unjust. I can accept focusing on "high-risk groups" (although one should question how this definition of a high-risk group is constructed), monitoring them, and trying them in court. What is unjust is punishing them without a fair trial.
I think it's funny that you vote for Obama because you think he's a good guy with a good vision for America, then when he gets into power and makes a decision you think is morally contemptuous, your first though is that 'he wasn't who I thought he was'.
What the fuck do you know about national security, SoftwareMaven? You're a programmer on Hacker News. You're not privy to the shit that Obama is privy to.
How do you know your idea of what is moral is also what would be good for society as a whole? How do you know that Obama isn't simply responding in a reasonable way to the reality that you have no conception of.
Also, throwaway so I don't get called a fascist nazi or whatever.
(I'm not gitmothrow.) I did that back during the Scwartz debates on HN, right after he died, using my primary account, which had thousands of karma at the time. Within a week after the incident, most of HN had calmed down and was saying the same things I had been saying.
But by that point my account had been super-ultra-hellbanned. I couldn't even post. It wasn't until another user's complaint about being hellbanned made the front page that my primary account was promoted to merely being dead.
The point is: people use throwaway accounts because the HN community has demonstrated that it is simply not safe to use your primary account to say something controversial unless you have tens of thousands of karma.
I understand that concept, except that the tone that was taken in his post and subsequent response to mine was just made to be snide. Instead of making an opinion and standing by it (which I would gladly upvote even if gray and it disagreed with my own personal opinion), he attacks the knowledge of a commenter via a generalization.
Making anonymous statements is essential in some situations, but in my personal opinion, I find it completely unnecessary in this particular one. If they had just gone with paragraph 1 and 3, then it'd be a perfectly fine comment. Instead it has a decidedly different feel and attitude which is then 'shielded' via a throwaway.
It's not being brave, it's being responsible for your own actions.
If you didn't use a throwaway, I'm sure you'd also do a much better job at making your comment a little more eloquent instead of just aggressive and angry.
Posting with a throwaway shows me that you probably don't even 100% believe what you just said.
This is stupid. There are plenty of reasons to post potentially controversial things anonymously, the same reasons against placing a darwin-fish on your car in overly religious regions. None of which have to do with cowardice.
I absolutely agree there are reasons, however this situation has someone acting more belligerent than rational. I personally find hiding anonymously when making such aggressive comments cowardly.
There was a perfectly fine point buried in his original comment, and I personally believe if he had posted with their own account, then they would have taken the time to proof-read and remove the unnecessary emotion and ire from the comment.
Political prisoners are being raped with food intubators to prevent themselves from committing suicide in America's secret torture prison, with the express consent and approval of President Obama, the American Congress, and the numerical majority of the American people.
Clueless middle class Western programmers on Hacker News believed everything some guy in prion said and thought they understood national security realities better than the president of the US.
And they made a bunch of brave comments. Much karma was exchanged.
Nostalgia tells me that your time was a simpler time, when people cared about politics/kids had morals/people were nicer. Also I learned in history class that Barack Obama was a great president who took the first steps toward universal healthcare. They talked about Guantanamo Bay for part of one day. The necessities of war are horrible sometimes; too bad they had to do that."
Seriously though, this is just one of the things that will be glossed over and never really talked about by future generations, similar to former practices such as the US's sterilization of minorities, or engineering bloody coups in Latin America to instill brutal dictators. Or our injustice to Native Americans.
Now you guys invent a time machine and come to tell us which of these two commenter is right.
Although technically they both can be right, what we are interested to know is if you future guys, like us, consider the right to a free trial as a fundamental and unbreachable right in any circumstances.
Sure, we believe you can kill enemy combatants, but if they surrender, we believe they have a right to a free trial within 60 or 90 days of detention.
So come back and tell us how our government is able to flounder the most fundamental rules and principles of law.
'Someone deserves the right to a defend himself in court and face specific charges before being thrown in a dungeon for life, being tortured and denied even the right to die? Ha- what a naive perspective.'
It must make you feel very clever and worldly-wise to dismiss people thus.
This is the most obvious of obvious human rights violations. It’s blatant. How anyone can defend it is beyond me. Holding someone for years without trial is barbaric and disgusting.
Guantanamo Bay is like the witch hunts in the medieval ages in the sense that when somebody was accused of being a witch there was no meaningful recourse.
Gitmo is the same. Most inmates have not been tried, some have been tortured (and are hence considered "untriable").
For a country that claims to follow the "rule of law" this is a strange affair to be in.
The "rule of law" way of out this is to bring these people to the US, and try them. If they cannot be convicted they are free. I believe that the long term cost/risk of not doing this is higher than any potential damage the inmates could do.
Witch hunts were primarily a phenomenon of the early modern period, not the middle ages, during which both the political authorities and the Church repeatedly cautioned against blaming e.g poor crops on supposed witches.
Also, I believe about half of witchcraft trials ended in execution - I'm not sure what the comparable rate is for Gitmo (although obviously there are no trials).
The medieval inquisition was indeed a witch hunt in the figurative sense but it did not hunt witches. It was primary occupied with hunting heretics (particularly Cathars). Its involvement in hunting witches started in the late 15th century at the very end of the middle ages.
The defenders of Gitmo in this era will be remembered by our descendants with the same shame and disgust we feel when remembering the slave holders and segregationists of the previous eras.
I hope that the defenders of the legal theories that allow people to be held without trial for many years get their fair share of the blame. Gitmo itself is bad, but the legal theories that let almost anyone be held there without due process are worse.
I understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups. But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity? There's a reason that US citizens have rights like due process (and you can see why everyone should get them, including Gitmo prisoners): If you can't prove it but refuse to let the defendant maintain the freedom that should be associated with presumption of innocence, you get incarceration of the type described in the original posting.
Actually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with heated resistance and continual protest (e.g. waterboarding enactments outside the law school). As a tenured professor, though, he couldn't be tossed out.
I don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution.
These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.
Tenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public.
Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution.
The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much.
Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.
I think that's the whole point: professors as a body should fear that if they go off and work to normalize a torture regime, they'll be fired by their universities. Hopefully that encourages them to not do such things. What's certain is that treating such conduct as "controversial" instead of just firing the person is exactly the same kind of DoS attack on tenure as these characters mounted on the legal system -- using the strengths of such systems against themselves.
We haven't invested much energy recently in creating institutions that have adequate defenses against this kind of threat model. Our assumption has been that the socialization structure either produces people who are pathologically criminal or are socially responsible. The emergence of a class of social behavior which is "respectable" and despicable at the same time is a threat we need to deal with.
So charge him with a crime already and we can get on with this removing-tenure business.
Except you can't - because he didn't violate international nor domestic law. He never waterboarded anyone, nor did he order the waterboarding of anyone.
He worked on legal justifications for the use of torture, which is not an area of international law that's well defined. He didn't make policy nor law, he spun law so that it fit existing policy.
I won't disagree that what he has done is despicable, but what exactly would you charge him with that would actually stick?
He will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.
If that is something that needs to be taken into account, we should all be locked up, just in case we do something wrong in the future. If a prisoner has done something wrong charge and try him, otherwise he is innocent and should be released. If we dismantle that principle, we are in far greater danger from our own than from any external force.
How can you judge? "On the record", even!! Isn't one of the major problems that it's unknown whether these people are even guilty of anything or not? No trial, remember? So how can you suddenly know and decide "for the record" what any one of these prisoners will do if they get out?
Is the man in the article lying then? He says he's innocent. Of course he would. But who are you to decide one or the other?
What do you mean "almost everyone?" The only people in Guantanamo are foreigners. The Supreme Court struck down the other "theories" in a series of cases starting with Hamdi v. Rumsfeld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdi_v._Rumsfeld.
Well, Wikipedia estimates the world population at ~7 billion people, and the US population at 315 million. So, "almost everyone" in the world is not an American citizen.
I'm not defending gitmo, but why wouldn't we remember its defenders the same way we remember those who have suspended habeas corpus in previous eras [1]?
Perhaps, but America is still operating under the context of two massive skyscrapers plummeting to the ground from an attack carried out with almost military precision. It's not as if Bush Jr. just woke up one day and decided that it was time to whip up some secret prisons. So if "context" is a defense then there's at least a little of it to spread around here as well.
Lincoln was not the man we make him out to be. The Emancipation Proclamation was purely political. Lincoln wanted to split the country and pick up the bigger half.
I suspect that, if not for the Emancipation Proclamation, we might call Lincoln a bad president.
I suspect that you have no idea what you are talking about and like many others on the internet, like to marginalize good people with your 20/20 hindsight.
What does that even mean? What would Lincoln gain by splitting the country in half? Do you even bother thinking about points before you make them?
>What would Lincoln gain by splitting the country in half?
Do you understand that this is the single most successful way to political success in a historically bipartisan political system? This is how American politics works (and always has worked). Political parties make a big deal out of what are small issues in other countries in order to try to polarize the American public. The emancipation proclamation was simply one of these polarizing tactics.
Here are a few Abraham Lincoln quotes you might enjoy:
>“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”
>“Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the government of a god, great enough to make and maintain this universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagogue-ism as this?”
>"there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
>"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it"
>"In the course of his reply, Senator Douglas remarked, in substance, that he had always considered this government was made for the White people and not for the negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too."
The hypocrisy of the New York Times in printing this is shocking. The newspaper which did so much to whip up hysteria during the years of the Bush administration now trying to raise concerns about the inmates of Guantanamo is shockingly cynical. It's a shameful state of affairs that our political process is so broken we cannot deal with this situation in a civilized fashion, with investigations, trials and an end result. Instead we live in an Orwellian state of perpetual war, one which the New York Times was happy to goad us into back in the days when they actually sold newspapers and profited from a nation's feelings of hurt and lust for vengeance.
The events you've outlined don't require intellectual dishonesty at all. It's possible to have thought war was a prudent course of action in 2003, then to have changed one's mind by 2013.
I think it's pretty well documented by now that the NYT advocated for positions which they knew to be false and passed on information they knew the source of but failed to notify the reader of in ways that deliberately misled readers, during this period. So, while you're right that one can hold one position then the other, I think that doesn't invalidate their mendacity.
Also hypocrisy is still a valid description of advocating a position which created this suffering then pointing out that this suffering is terrible and that someone should do something.
However, I do think (see my comment later in the thread) that it has to be remembered that hypocrisy isn't the worst sin one can commit, and if they can be as effective in moving us to the next phase in all of this as they were in pushing the agenda forward which led to this situation in the first place that's a net good thing.
Eh, false memories. I distinctly remember the day after 9/11. Real people greeted it with maybe a sad shrug. I remember talking to a janitor who predicted war with Iraq. (He knew guys in the military who got phone calls right after.) Shrug. Whatever. It was only the media that kept up the hysteria.
The janitor and the New York Times were on the same page. Shrug. I still don't care that much. Those guys at gitmo at this point could seriously prove embarrassing, either through talking or blowing themselves up. That doesn't effect me, but TPTB are risk-averse.
In this case I think the hypocrisy is positive; I would much rather NYT be hypocritical by speaking out against Guantanamo rather than holding their old position.
Yes this is a great point. One thing that I don't want to fall into the habit of doing, and I got close to in my initial point, in my disgust for their hypocrisy is something I see as a problem in modern politics. Hypocrisy isn't the greatest sin in the world, but we sometimes act like it is and make the consequences of hypocrisy (or changing your mind) so great (electoral defeat) that people will hold onto a bad policy and continue bad or harmful action in favor of not flip flopping or being hypocritical. So you make a good point, and it's better that they at least attempt to remedy some of the harm they have contributed to, than hold onto a morally bankrupt position.
Hypocrisy and changing ones mind aren't the same thing. To me hypocrisy implies playing both sides of an issue at the same time, or disingenuously trying to appear to have changed your mind, when you're pursuing an ulterior motive. Maybe the NYT is doing this, I don't know. But if so, it's more than simply changing their minds.
A) It is not hypocritical to change ones opinions given time and new information. Hypocrisy is doing something you advocate against while you are an advocate against it. Believing otherwise is to argue against the scientific method itself.
B) Is it even a conflicting opinion to think a certain war may be just, but some actions taken as part of that war are unjust? One example of such a situation may be the Japanese internment camps in WWII. Many people argue that the war itself was just, and worth fighting, while the Japanese internment camps were a grave mistake.
Perhaps they thought the Iraq war was righteous thing, while thinking the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay far from just.
C) To be Orwellian is to deny the past. Has the NYT ever claimed they didn't take a stance that they did? Have they denied printing those words that supported the war? If they haven't rewritten history they haven't been Orwellian.
Please don't cry wolf on things like this, because we need to credibly make these arguments when something really is Orwellian.
I wonder if this indicates a change in the NYT's moral leadership, or if Washington is ready to close gitmo and wants to drive public opinion in a way that'll make it more acceptable politically.
I suppose we'll be able to tell by whether the NYT starts asking the hard questions on drones in the next few months.
And by the way, I'm all for hypocrisy when it means moving against the cruelty and injustice of the past.
I remember those times as well. I remember how they convinced so many people that the biggest issue facing the United States was Saddam Hussein ... Even liberals were buying it, or prefacing their statements with "I know he's a bad guy who has to go right away, but..." It was pretty crazy.
Or, how about that they successfully convinced the American voter to elect more Republicans in 2002 because ... Saddam. Makes no sense right? But it worked. It was successful enough to convince the opposition party to also support the war.
Let's not forget that Dick Cheney's office leaked a fake story to the New York Times, then cited that story as a reason for going to war... People forget that now, and just how fucked up it is.
"The international community had good reason to set this requirement. Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them."
Yep, I remember that. I don't think that action, or even what Bush the elder did, was anywhere near the colossal fuckup and misinformation of the 2000s decade, though.
We all lived through those years - or anyone old enough to be commenting on here did - and I disagree. I think the media climate, which is what we're talking about when we are discussing newspapers, was absolutely one of hysteria. The march to war and the support for remedies such as Guantanamo. If the American media landscape and political climate was not one of hysteria when we made such terrible choices then it speaks far worse of us than the alternative.
Sure there was hysteria, right down to color-coded threat level alerts and people duct-taping their windows to protect themselves from chemical and biological attacks.
Even prominent or well-known people were afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal (a valid fear: see Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher).
"EXECUTIVE ORDER -- REVIEW AND DISPOSITION OF INDIVIDUALS DETAINED AT THE GUANTÁNAMO BAY NAVAL BASE AND CLOSURE OF DETENTION FACILITIES
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to effect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Guantánamo) and promptly to close detention facilities at Guantánamo..."
So if that is a standing order - then they are operating Gitmo in clear defiance of a direct order by the President of the United States?
Gitmo is a prison run by the military, and he is the Commander-in-Chief, so every day any soldier performs any duty there - they are in clear violation of command?
Not exactly. The order concerns shutting down the prison on the base within one year, not the base as a whole. More importantly, it is contingent on the law and appropriations (i.e. money) to have any teeth. Within months, that part of the order effectively became impossible to fulfill.
Closing it would mean having the prisoners moved elsewhere, but not a change to how they are being dealt with. That's the real issue; the location isn't what matters.
Due process could be instated at the current location, or the detainees could be moved to another location and be treated exactly the same. The location is not the problem.
> He could also order due process to start tomorrow.
The correct course of action, obviously.
> Maybe there are a few issues with sending people back to their countries, but certainly not in all cases.
Well, as Commander in Chief, he could just order the Marines to cut a hole in Gitmo's perimeter fence and shoo the prisoners into Cuber though it. I'm sure Fidel and Raúl would be pleased to handle their homeward travel arrangements, albeit not quietly.
Hell, Obama could even save some postage by having the Marines entrust the prisoners to a deliver a $4085 check to the Treasurer General of the [Cuban] Republic, in payment of Gitmo's annual rental[1].
In the UK at least it's continuing to do harm for the US government reputation every time the media bring it up, or worse yet, bring up the fact that there are British citizens still there whom the British government wants to repatriate yet the US won't release. The majority of the British citizens who have formerly been in there have made front-page news (at least in the UK) every time any have been released.
If there is no clean accusation: let them go where ever they want to go and compensate them for the time in jail. That would be the normal way democracies should deal with such things. If there is a clean accusation, they can be brought to any other jail in the US.
Not necessarily more, but it would require a different distribution. Money would need to be spent to relocate the prisoners. Congress has blocked that reappropriation.
Quoting Wikipedia:
On May 20, 2009, the United States Senate passed an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 2346) by a 90-6 vote to block funds needed for the transfer or release of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[14] President Obama issued a Presidential memorandum dated December 15, 2009, ordering Thomson Correctional Center, Thomson, Illinois to be prepared to accept transferred Guantanamo prisoners.
On January 7, 2011, President Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which, in part, placed restrictions on the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland or to foreign countries, thus impeding the closure of the facility.[17] U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates said during testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee on February 17, 2011: "The prospects for closing Guantanamo as best I can tell are very, very low given very broad opposition to doing that here in the Congress."[18] Congress particularly opposed moving prisoners to facilities in the United States for detention or trial.
/quote
In short, congress passes bills to prevent Obama from closing Gitmo. Obama signed one or more of those in order to balance other political agendas. The annual Defense Authorization Act is a particularly politicized bill that congress is known to use as an offensive weapon.
Does congress control how Gitmo is run? My understanding is that the President is in charge of the how (execution of the law), and congress only controls the what.
This is true in theory, but in practice, Congress can be as specific as it likes about how the money is allowed to be spent.
For example (from the NDAA 2013, Section 1022)[1]:
"(a) In General- No amounts authorized to be appropriated or otherwise made available to the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2013 may be used to construct or modify any facility in the United States, its territories, or possessions to house any individual detained at Guantanamo for the purposes of detention or imprisonment in the custody or under the control of the Department of Defense unless authorized by Congress.
(b) Exception- The prohibition in subsection (a) shall not apply to any modification of facilities at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."
In Canada we remember with shame the WW2 Japanese internment camps. Gitmo will be this generations great shame. Marriage equalization, and reasonable pot legislation are happening... But gitmo remains a black mark. Due process should not be malleable.
With this story of Guantanamo Bay and the story of children born into prison camps in North Korea, as a mere software engineer, it makes me feel hopeless as to how to help.
If you're in the US, pixelcort, may I invite you to consider the Downsize DC effort? (http://www.downsizedc.org/)
Here is a quick summary of what DownsizeDC.org is about:
We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states.
The strategy of Downsize DC is to leverage technology to make it easier for people to make their voices heard to the State. They make it easier to contact your Senate and House representatives regularly.
The primary bill DownsizeDC is advocating is the Read the Bills Act -- make it law to read aloud each bill before signing it into law. That action alone would slow down the legislating machine.
The other one is the One Subject at a Time act -- make each bill deal with one subject at a time, instead of bundling subjects, which would make it very clear about politician's positions on various issues, and let each issue stand on its own merit.
Isn't this topic -- the question of how to close Guantanamo Bay -- a prime counterexample to the virtues of "mak[ing] it law to read aloud each bill before signing it into law" and "mak[ing] each bill deal with one subject at a time"?
Wouldn't such requirements make politically unpopular things, such as touching Guantanamo Bay in any way, even more difficult to handle?
This article doesn't strike me as fertile, favorable ground for this topic at all.
Not that one would say this, but if the counterargument were to be, "this movement would have prevented Guantanamo in the first place," then (1) but I live in the world we have now, not a hypothetical world that we don't actually have, and (2) maybe so, maybe not.
Maybe it's because I'm Canadian, but I think it's stupid not to read bills out loud at least once before they become law.
In our House of Commons the procedure is to read each bill, out loud, three times before it is passed. Then it gets sent to the Senate where it's also read three times (mind you the Senate typically rubber stamps everything).
So every law in Canada has been read out loud a total of six times, and (assuming they're present) every member of the legislature has heard it three times.
That's downright amazing. I can't imagine it would be physically possible to read aloud all US bills passed in a year that many times. My impression is that some bills are upwards of a thousand pages.
I would be really interested in comparing the average length of Canadian legislation with American legislation.
I have no ideas about the average length, but I'd guess a normal length would about 10-15 pages. You can check out recent bills passed here if you're interested:
(Hat tip to openparliament.ca, it's an awesome site)
In fact, our current government got in trouble in the last few years for passing two very large omnibus bills, C-10 (the "Safe Streets and Communities Act", which makes many changes to the criminal code) and C-45 (the "Jobs and Growth Act", which makes many fiscal changes, among other things).
They weigh in at 114 pages and 430 pages, respectively, in their normal two-column (English & French) layout. These are not typical and they caused a lot of commotion in the media and from the opposition when the government tabled them, mostly because of their lengths but also because of the limited amount of debate that was allowed about them.
It's rare that every member of the US legislature is present at all times. Just because someone hears something, does not mean they are listening. They could simply present the bill electronically before signing instead of reading it aloud. Reading out the whole bill each time is fairly pointless if only one provision is in question.
But mostly this is stupid because it does not address the issue it purports to.
Let's say government growing out of bound (and government's power growing compared to an individual's power) is a problem. One way to curb that growth is to slow down the functioning of government.
But if you don't consider monotonic growth of government a problem, then we are very far apart indeed. =)
I'm not here to discuss "the problem". Because there's totally just one problem with our government.
"Slowing down the functioning of government" is not a good thing. "The government" (by this I assume you mean legislation) already moves at a snail's pace. Making it go slower, so reforms and important issues take even longer than they already do to resolve? NOT HELPING.
People talk about the 'size' of 'government' like it's some kind of tangible property. Government is just the system by which our policies, actions and affairs are executed. It might be big, it might be small, it doesn't matter. It is whatever we need it to be.
What concerns me are the issues and how we deal with them, not some abstract idea like "too much" or "not enough" of the system. If we need to get a respectable budget planned, a "big" or "small" government will not fix that. Your budget may be smaller because your "government" is smaller, but that doesn't make it a good budget. Your regulations of certain businesses may be smaller, but that doesn't mean the new free reign these businesses have will result in customers being treated fairly or allowing other businesses to compete.
There are reason we have what we have. It's not like there's some super exponential growth formula being fed to a giant single celled organism called "government". There's hundreds of complex issues at hand, and your one-size-fits-all generic solution doesn't begin to address any of them. Rather it buries them under a carpet of obfuscation, waiting for the rug to be so choked by lack of observation that someone finally will throw it out for a new one.
Build better proxies/tools of resistance, generally fight authority, just be a hacker and be on the lookout for ways to empower the downtrodden.
The hacker instinct is to get around the system and fight authority. There's another hacker instinct, too, which is being totally and absurdly pedantic. Maybe there is an idea here.
Sometimes the first world chooses leaders who are, at day's end, okay with a some of the horrors of barbaric legal systems (usually in exchange for increased security or the illusion thereof). One solution might be to be politically pedantic (seriously!) and not let them get away with even a bit of it.
Unfortunately if people can go to jail for increnting a variable in a public URL, any effort of this nature is sure to draw the fire of United States law.
I don't even live in the place, and it still scares the crap out of me.
Tell me about it, I grew up in Pinochet's Chile and it worries me deeply how our government is ignoring the constitution and bullying its way around the same way Pinochet did back in the 80's.
With its treatment of gitmo detainees and persecution of wikileaks' Julian Assange, the US is lowering itself to the constitutional level of a run-of-the-mill banana republic.
Somehow it strikes me as odd that the executive can go around starting wars, one of the most costly (blood & gold) behaviors a gov't can engage in, and one that explicitly requires the approval of congress, without congressional approval, but when it comes to closing a torture dungeon it's 'well gee whiz I'd love to but mean old congress won't let me. Sorry- my hands are tied!'
horseshit. There's more than one way to skin a cat and with the unchecked might of the US military (which is basically what the executive commands these days with our spineless-vis-a-vis-war congress), I do not believe the president couldn't figure out a way to dissolve Gitmo if he wanted to. He doesn't want to, this torture happens because Obama wants it to happen.
EDIT: I'm probably wrong here in my first paragraph ^
My statement that wars were started "without congressional approval" may be wrong. That said, I still do not believe that it's outside the president's power to shut down gitmo. As many other commenters here have pointed out, he could simply order marines to free those prisoners with no charges to Cuban soil; this would cost no money at all; congress would not be able to prevent it. Could the president not do this?
Furthermore, he promised to do so repeatedly during his campaign. Was the president, a constitutional scholar, merely mistaken about his powers as the executive?
I apologize for muddying the waters with discussion of other presidential actions.
No, the president can't just release prisoners into Cuba because A) Cuba is a sovereign country and the US doesn't get to just deposit individuals there, terrorist or not. B) The president literally cannot pay for any operation, at all, to close the prison.
I suggest you read up more on the issue before forming such a strong opinion.
If this decision is so clearly and unequivocally not his to make, why did he promise to do it in the first place? Is he stupid or a liar? I don't think he's stupid.
A majority of Presidential campaign platforms are issues which also need Congressional approval. Tax Reform, healthcare, domestic policy, spending cuts, and budgets. Obama did what he said, but congress blocked him. He's neither stupid, nor a liar for that. Any more than he would have been lying if Congress blocked healthcare reform.
It's the entire Western sense of superiority (I'm American). Gitmo is America saying that the rules we hold ourselves to don't apply to "others." It's hypocritical bullshit, and we deserve what we get because of it.
But it's not just the US (or just Gitmo) -- read about the treatment of refugees in Australia (tl;dr: it's better than Gitmo, but not good by a long shot -- http://mitahungerstrike.wordpress.com). And I don't mean to pick on Australia, because the Australian government is no more (or less) guilty than the governments of much of the developed world, I just want to make a point that we all are having terrible things done to other human beings in our names.
Refugees, including children, are held in prisons. Sometimes for many years. All without trial. Why no trial? Largely because they have not committed any crime -- it is quite legal to seek asylum.
On the subject of Australia and Refugees, a relatively recent book called "The People Smuggler"[1] is a fascinating read. It's the story of an Iraqi man, called Ali Al Jenabi, and how he ended up ferrying people from Indonesia to Australia.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The declaration of independence is a document with zero legal force. It's a bunch of nice sounding words to justify our attempt to separate from the British, nothing more.
It may not be a legal document but it certainly more than just a "bunch of nice sounding words." I hear this argument get trotted out all the time as if the only way to value a document and how it should inform policy is if it is a legal one.
Further: Given a big enough of a profit it is easy to turn a blind eye. That simple fact is a massive problem for humanity going forward. Greed before humanity is now a reality.
I know for a fact that much of these claims are completely wrong and, being told by a detainee, are completely biased.
Detainee's that refuse meals are required to receive their nutrients in liquid form. They have the option to drink this themselves. When they refuse, they are put in the feeding chair which restrains their arms, legs, and waist. It does not restrain a detainees head whatsoever.
When a detainee refuses to drink the liquid themselves, and refuses to go to the restraint chair themselves, they're carried to the chair by a Forced Cell Extraction team. ERF is a term that the detainee's created themselves. There are 6 guards, not 8, and it is for the safety of the detainee, as there is one guard to handle each body part (2 legs, 2 arms, head), and then one at the door to ensure that the detainee does not escape. Every FCE is video taped to ensure that safe and humane practices are being followed.
They do this for this exact reason. Publicity. We wont send them back to Yemen because we don't want their heads to be severed by their Government. No one wants this place to be open. Don't be foolish, America. Don't be gullible, America. We are still the good guys.
You know this for a fact? Not to be too cynical here, but do you have a citation for any of your claims? Who is able to review these taped feedings in order to confirm that they're being carried out in a humane way? Could I, as a citizen do this? Could a reporter for the NYT? The absurdity of the censorship at the KSM trial makes me think your claims would be hard to verify. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/01/secrec...
And frankly, your nationalistic sign off makes me less inclined to believe you without references. "We are still the good guys" is kind of vapid.
Nobody wants these people. 15 American lawyers went to Yemen to expose the lie that Yemen didn't want these people back. No one from the Yemeni govt would meet with them. We haven't gotten rid of them because we don't know anyone who is willing to accept them. Go ahead and read it in the Yemeni Observer. http://www.yobserver.com/front-page/10012301.html
This starts with a false assumption. There is absolutely no justification for force feeding a non-consenting person who is aware of the consequences of their actions.
This is a fascinating insight into what the DoD thinks the story is, and a frightening example of why fair trial and due process should be required to incarcerate people.
Who are these "medical personnel" performing these acts? I am a physician and I can tell you that force feeding these people is against our code of ethics. The physician overseeing their treatment should be 'outed' so that we can report this behavior to his/her licensing board.
I totally agree with you. However, I can easily see how those physicians can justify their actions to themselves. "Do no harm" can be extrapolated in many ways by cruel people suffering from delusion.
> When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.
Sorry but this account is troubling. He went to Afghanistan during the Taliban extremely insane cruel anti-woman Islamist totalitarian regime and expected a better life? That's like someone saying he traveled to Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime and expected a better pay as he didn't know anything about Cambodia at the time. This alone takes the credibility away from this story for me.
The rest is an account about how they are force feeding him because of is voluntary hunger strike. Anyone knows how hunger strikes are handled in other penitentiaries? Not sure they can just let the prisoners die.
> Sorry but this account is troubling. He went to Afghanistan during the Taliban extremely insane cruel anti-woman Islamist totalitarian regime and expected a better life? That's like someone saying he traveled to Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime and expected a better pay as he didn't know anything about Cambodia at the time. This alone takes the credibility away from this story for me
While it might sound "insane" to you because of the stark contrast to your own life, you fail to put yourself in his shoes.
You know, not everyone was born into your (or my) privilege, freedom and education here in life.
If you've lived your whole life in poor, rural Yemen with only limited local media as your one window to the world, maybe Afghanistan, a fellow Arabic/Muslim state isn't such bad a place.
I'd say it's equally insane for, say, a Frenchman to travel to the United States while they operate secret military prisons with complete disregard for human rights.
"Sorry but this account is troubling. He went to Afghanistan during the Taliban extremely insane cruel anti-woman Islamist totalitarian regime and expected a better life? That's like someone saying he traveled to Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime and expected a better pay as he didn't know anything about Cambodia at the time."
And this is enough to condemn him to an indeterminate amount of time in prison without a trial? If we have compelling evidence of wrong-doing then we should grant him a trial. Let the actual judicial process decide his punishment, rather than an arbitrary declaration.
If we don't have enough compelling evidence then we should release him. The entire point of habeas corpus is to prevent people from being held for extended time on the mere suspicion from arbitrary authorities.
What's the point of having a judicial system if we can send arbitrarily selected people around it and deny writs of habeas corpus? What will you do if one day an authority finds something you've done suspicious and throws you in jail? The protection afforded by writs of habeas corpus should apply to all of us, or it's a meaningless protection.
Afghanistan was under the secular, socialist leadership of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan until the CIA launched Operation Cyclone and began funding Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda and Taliban predecessors, in order to overthrow that secular, socialist government. Sylvester Stallone made action films like Rambo 3 where he fought alongside Islamic jihadists to overthrow the secular Afghan government. Now some poor guy trying to make a living you pontificate about because he went to a country which was exactly like how the US tried to make it? But they're totalitarian...I guess whisking people off to detention centers with no evidence, no recourse to trial is the democratic way.
This is very sad ... but what do you think is the reason they can't close this center since 2008? Who is responsible for this state of affairs and what can be done?
I make no apologies for Obama- he should have closed Gitmo.
Yet, there's one tiny tiny possibility that I have considered for why he hasn't. Before becoming president, you make promises, have goals, and overall think you know what you're going to do on day one.
However, after inauguration you go for your first big debriefing with the CIA, FBI, etc... The things you learn there completely change the course what you want to do, or can do. You find that we were constantly in significantly more danger than any citizen could have anticipated.
Now, I don't find this to be likely, but just something I've considered. Why in the world would have Obama gone from wanting to close Gitmo, to being pretty much against it? Politics alone don't seem to cover it, since pretty much everyone wants it closed. Logistics? It doesn't seem that hard...
So it's not the case that there was a huge cache of information that he didn't have access too until entering office. It could have been the case that there were some details that weren't made available to him, but that seems unlikely to amount to anything that would lead to a complete reversal of policy.
Who cares whose fault this is? It has to end now. If you feel overwhelmed but still want to do something, the least you can do is to support Amnesty International.
Lot of things mentioned here are not that easy. To legally bring citizens of other countries in American justice system and have them fair trial you need to have respect various treaties - many of which may simply require sending them back to their respective country to be handled by their own governments which usually is not the best thing especially for terrorist suspects. The next best thing however might be have them as prisoner of war kept out side of US justice system.
What is missing here is other side of the coin, however. Keeping people in Gitmo takes money, planning, book keeping and plenty of other administrative hassles. Even though there was no trial it is hard to imagine that military doesn't do any accounting of these people and they are just kept there, fed, clothed every day without any justification or reasoning. I know govt can't be trusted from wasting taxpayer money but it looks over the top that such a high profile place will keep people for 11 years straight without any convincing reasoning. Without response from govt to this story we only know one side.
It's US' burden to solve the Gitmo issue, whether it's easy or hard. America can't keep telling people that it's the land of democracy and freedom, and ignore Gitmo at the same time.
>To legally bring citizens of other countries in American justice system...
Gitmo is 100% American. If you think what US did there is outside of jurisdiction, it's fuckin politics and not reality. Stop ignoring the facts and face it.
>The next best thing however might be have them as prisoner of war...
Either there's no war or it's already over. Those people in Gitmo are there because US don't know how to clean up it's own shit without facing international humiliation when the press arrives at the door of the released prisoners.
>Even though there was no trial it is hard to imagine that military doesn't do any accounting of these people and they are just kept there...
So you're OK with a system if military or let's say a central authority decides if someone is guilty or not, without giving the man his right to defend himself. Where do you draw the line? Is it OK if military tells you that your friend is a terrorist? How about you father? "it is hard to imagine that military doesn't do any accounting of these people", after all.
> Lot of things mentioned here are not that easy. To legally bring citizens of other countries in American justice system and have them fair trial you need to have respect various treaties - many of which may simply require sending them back to their respective country to be handled by their own governments which usually is not the best thing especially for terrorist suspects.
Bureaucratic considerations are of no consequence. The reputation of the United States of America is at stake.
It's 2013. These cases need to be resolved. The innocent should be sent home with apologies and fat Treasury checks. The guilty should be executed. And Gitmo should go back to being a Caribbean naval base with a cheap annual rent[2].
I can't say if the current case is valid, but I am reminded of the case of Ahmed Errachidi[1], Guantánamo Prisoner 590, who turned out to be a London chef who had journeyed to Pakistan in 2001 and was kidnapped by crooked Pakis and sold to the credulous US for $5000. Errachidi was finally sprung in 2007. But you have to wonder how many similar cases there are.
I wouldn't. Due process for people who are perceived to be terrorists is not actually an especially popular viewpoint with the majority of the American public[0].
The rest of the world wants due process for these detainees. Most people in hacker communities tend to lean far more libertarian or liberal than the average American and want due process for these detainees. These are not the people who determine the outcome of elections.
I just sent my congressman an email outlining that I would like to see everybody given a trial and either deported or moved to a federal prison.
I would recommend that others reach out to their representatives and do the same. I imagine that if we, the people, do not make any noise about this then we are going to get more of the same.
"First they came for the Yemeni, but I was not one so I thought nothing of it.
Then they came for the Afghani, but I was not one, so I didn't mind.
...
Then they came for my neighbors, and I hid.
...
By the time they came for me there was no one to stop them..."
I think the most important part about this OpEd is the comments appearing here and elsewhere:
Lots of righteous indignation for this poor fellow who claims that he's completely innocent of any charges brought against him and if he could only talk to someone they would understand. He feels the need to kill himself to prove a point, such conviction.
What do they say about a prisoner and his crime? oh yeah: there's no such thing as a guilty prisoner in Jail.
What are the official laws regarding a POW? Certainly not that of naturalized citizens...
After skimming the UN Laws for POWs[1] and reading the parts that seemed to deal with internment and time length, it's not really clear to me why he should have to be tried.
Once he's be associated with the enemy he can be held until the end of Hostilities at which point the "host" country can decide when and how to exchange him with "ex-enemy" . That last part will be a little difficult because I don't think Al-Qaeda takes many prisoners.
That said, they might be violating laws regarding torture but that's a whole nother ball of wax.
Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake.
Clearly there was someone who felt this dude was dangerous or else they wouldn't have flown him halfway around the world to "sit in limbo" there are prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq and it's MUCH cheaper to keep prisoners there, the only ones flown to cuba are those deemed "a higher security risk".
A hint at possible charges is hidden in the third paragraph of his plea for attention: "Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden..." he of course qualifies this by saying it's not true. But if true is fairly serious because it would imply he was highly trusted if he was a personal guard for OBL.
Again I haven't done any actual research into his situation but he most probably doesn't deserve nearly half the self-righteous indignation that everyone here is displaying.
> Once again these are things he is claiming, I haven't done any research into his situation and I doubt anyone here has either. All I'm saying is that taking the word of someone who is in prison for possible terrorism is a mistake.
So you are happy with "guilty until proven innocent" and "as he might be guilty, we can't give him the chance to prove otherwise because he might fool the legal system" as a moral precedents?
If there is evidence charge him and give him a fair trial, if there isn't admit so and let him go.
> but he most probably doesn't deserve nearly half the self-righteous indignation that everyone here is displaying.
You might be right, you might be wrong. But how will we ever know one way or the other without evidence presented? This is the sort of thing we in the west regularly chide other regimes for, and we are doing it ourselves making complete hypercrits of ourselves - this is why people who care about such things are getting rather indignant about the whole thing.
In times of war it is guilty until proven innocent, did you take a look at the UN link?
Two powers who are "at War" can take anyone into custody that they think is "aid and abetting the enemy" and they do not have to release them until the war ends.
In times of war most civil liberties are suspended, we can discuss the fairness or "rightness" of that, but until we can all calm down and talk instead of hit that's the reality that we live in.
The same way a soldier gives his life to his country and with that signs away his freedom, the same way that war suddenly makes murder "legal", war gives a government body the "right" to take away what one would think are inalienable rights. I laugh at their indignation because they think they can pick and choose which parts of war to keep, but the reality is it's all or nothing and everything in between.
The USGov are not applying the POW rules to the Guantanamo prisoners otherwise they'd have more legal protections. That's why the Bushies had to dream up the "enemy combatant" legal limbo in order to be able to abuse the prisoners like this.
Even under "war rules" these prisoners should be dealt with in a better way.
And "Guilty until proven innocent?" Really? Idiot.
Even so Enemy combatant has a lot of the same laws as POWs.
It's possible they should be treated better but this guy is a known bodyguard of UBL[1] and has lied consistently to everyone [1] so it's not clear how he's being treated (remember this is a Oped about politics - anything goes).
I'll ignore the last line as you've said nothing of substance.
This individual is not the issue. Guantanamo Bay is the issue.
That facility is in use in order to circumvent the law in treatment of prisoners period. It was located in Cuba in order to not be on US soil, because the Bush administration thought that offshore abuse would be easier to get away with.
If you have been awake at all during the past 12 years you will have heard the news stories about prisoners being tortured/executed there.
Furthermore, you will have heard the news stories of many inmates there turning out to be completely innocent.
Finally, you will have heard of the "people sweeps" in Afghanistan and Pakistan in which local warlords sold off people arbitrarily as "terrorists" to US forces, who didn't know better (and didn't care).
These people have been bunged up in Guantanamo without a fair trail. A fair trial is the only way to determine if they actually are who you and the lying US military claim they are.
If the prisoners are "guilty" of being enemy soldiers, then yes they can rot in jail until the US withdraws from Afghanistan.
If they are innocent, they should be freed immediately and compensated.
If you can't fathom that the word of the US military (or any part of any government really) should not just be taken on trust, you should take a time-machine to Nazi Germany. You'll love it there.
There is a (A) regular prisoner, that the normal legal
rules apply to, including for terrorists.
Then there is (B) prisoner-of-war, which is for if
there is a state of war and said person is a soldier
in an enemy state.
Anybody who does not fit into category (B) by default
fits into category (A).
"Enemy combatant" is something the Bush Administration
pulled out of their ass because they wanted to torture
prisoners.
If they were following the rules instead of making up criminal shit like that, they'd have had to treat the
AlQaeda suspects ("suspects" including innocent
civilians turned in for bounties) as category (A)
civilian prisoners and not torture them. That
wouldn't have fit the Bushies' plan.
The plan was to torture the prisoners by water boarding
and make them "confess" that Saddam Hussein was behind
911 - to manufacture a "reason" for the Bushies to attack
Iraq. And the plan worked.
TL:DR: This dude was at the wrong place at the wrong time; and unless the US Government can prove otherwise, they should either release him, or if he is a terrorist, it would be a net-win if they just let him die of hunger (As their reputation w.r.t Gitmo has already been sullied).
--
In a parallel universe, I claim that you are committing conspiracy to overthrow the reigning King. You say you were just walking by the forest to check out wildlife. I say nonsense; I have the power to capture you. The extent of your crime is that you were in the forest.
I then capture you and throw you in a dungeon/prison, parade you naked, urinate you, rob you of basic dignity, flog you when I have a bad day or just for my amusement. I also feed you the same bland food daily.
This is your reality [1]
I do this continuously for 20 years == 7300 days in a row. You either start growing crazy or realize it would be better to end the misery yourself. At this point you have been robbed of the aspirations you had to contribute to scientific discovery by cataloguing flora and fauna. You realize that you haven't seen your children for ~20 years. Because you have been labeled an enemy of the state, your wife was thrown out of the city limits, etc. You choose the only option that is remotely viable: deprive yourself of nutrition till you die.
I rob you of that choice. YOU DON'T HAVE ANY FUCKING CHOICE NOW. I strap you to a cot, and force feed you a disgusting liquid diet for the next N years of your life. You live like this for the rest of your life or till I decide otherwise.
Because in this scenario, I have power, I can do whatever I please in the name of protecting the life of this King.
[1] As an experiment, lock yourself in a room for a day/week with some bland nutritious food & pots & pans for bodily functions. No books, no computers, no phone or music players, or any other distractions. For added effect, wear noise canceling headphones & blindfolds. And just chill. Repeat this for a long period of time, and you'll either want to kill yourself because your existence has been reduced to nothing, or you'll go crazy. In reality you'll get pretty restless and bored within the hour.
Cute story but unless you know something I don't about his case which you're not sharing then it's just that... a cute story.
If that's what happened well it sucks to be him but technically under the Geneva Convention and current laws of war, the US is allowed to hold him until the war ends at which point it must try him before a court (which can be a military tribunal) or trade him for it's own soldiers who are being held as POWs (which doesn't really happen because Al-Qaeda murders most prisoners).
Also small quibble with your story, he's been held for less than 10 years not more than 20. He gets normal food and can talk with fellow inmates and his guards, he is not urinated upon nor does he claim he was tortured, aside from being force fed. He does have access to all sorts of entertainment, so there isn't quite 1:1 parity here.
And for the record: a hunger strike (to death), like suicide is not I repeat not EVER an acceptable form of protest. Suicide is a cop-out, and a principle =/= a life.
a life >>>>>>> a principle.
To take your life in a form of protest is to admit you are wrong.
Also someone just posted a link to his Dossier and this guy is far from innocent: He admitted to fighting for Al-Qaida, he is mentioned in Al-Qaida documentation, regarding UBL.
So there you have it: he wasn't "walking in the forest to check out wildlife".
Who are you to say what's acceptable for someone else to do with their life? He probably doesn't adhere to the same principles you do (judging by your comments, most people probably don't). Also, it clearly says held since 2002, so not less than 10 years.
we don't need to put him on trial until the war ends
And he doesn't need a trial, we just don't want him to go back out there and fight again which is totally fair and how POWs work.
Take a look at the Geneva Convention, not the Wiki version but the actual thing either from the part that I posted or go to the UN website and take a look.
No, you don't have a right to claim that he is guilty of anything until it is proven beyond reasonable doubt.
The Geneva convention is irrelevant to that.
Whether or not US Forces say he's guilty does not make him guilty in reality. They could be lying; they have lied many times in the past
It doesn't look like anyone on this thread has even tried to look for what this man is accused of doing and why he's in Gitmo in the first place. You can find a dossier from the US DoD of this man at the NYTimes' own website:
You're right, I don't think citizenship is a requirement. I guess this was my vague way of saying that these prisoners are in a legal gray area as to what court they would be tried in, what their legal rights are, and what would constitute a 'fair trial'.
This seems to be actively debated in the upper echelons of US law and politics:
> You're right, I don't think citizenship is a requirement.
Please, download the iConstitution app and spend 10-15 minutes reading it.
> these prisoners are in a legal gray area
No, the prisoners and their lawyers know where they stand. The US DOJ is trying to figure out the grey are they are. The guilty ones have been tried and sentences. These others may be of questionable character but not enough to be guilty. Now the US government is filing appeal after appeal to keep the lawyers busy because in the end the US will be deeply embarrassed by this whole affair.
Yeah, nazis got a trial .... after the war, but when does a war end? When both sides agree to end hostilities.
So as soon as Al-Qaeda agrees to end hostilities all those in Gitmo will either be freed or tried. This is life not some stupid movie or game, we don't get "do-overs" and "I'm sorry"'s. If you associate with a regime that another stronger power thinks is wrong you're gonna have a bad time. (and the UN allows it)
Secondly, 11 years without trial or even a concrete charge against "an accused terrorist" would be something USA and its citizens would be appalled about if Russia or China did so to their "terrorists".
Thirdly, I am against hunger strikes when they can be avoided. Simply because they can turn political and in turn can be abused. Gandhi did abuse it a bit. Indian politicians and activists do it a lot. But eleven years of being held without solid evidence or being charge is just fucked up. This is being done out of desperation and fatigue rather than ideology.
Actually in most official Documents he's known as Usama Bin Laden thus UBL (Also he's referred to that way throughout ZDT, if you want a cultural reference)
He's not just an accused terrorist, he's a enemy combatant and a POW, totally different ball game. And while the US might be "appalled if Russia or China did it," it would be for political reasons (the enemy of my enemy is my friend) and not ethical (reasons).
Finally, this thread has gone on far enough, I'm stepping out. I will not be replying to anymore posts.
I don't understand why one would insist that he lives (prohibit hunger strike) and at the same time refuse him a trial. If he is guilty of some crime, then let him stand trial and suffer the consequences. If there is really no evidence against him then he should be freed. If the feeding tube is in your hand and you don't try for one of these options, you are not human.
Legally, these guys are non-lawful enemy combatants. They have put themselves in a legal grey area, not by committing crimes, but by committing acts of war. Many, if not all of them have been trained, if captured, to try to disrupt the legal system by any means necessary. They are fighting a war.
According to the US Constitution, it is Congress that establishes courts (except the supreme court) and decides what their purpose is. The President does not get to decide this. Military commissions have been accordingly established by Congress to try the detainees. The current President halted this process. Thus the detainees are in legal limbo until either Congress establishes a different court to hear the cases or the President decides to comply with the current law.
Here goes my respect for obama, for democracy which he stands for, for the whole nobel peace prize community. Now I know why Gandhi never won it. He would have felt disgraced today.
US is a disgrace to human rights, a hypocritical country who brings democracy to the world
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB
interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike
demanding a defense lawyer of my choice
(the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead).
The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court,
and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they
started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils.
Another example of the hypocrisy of our goverment which claims to champion ideals like freedom and equality before the law.
As long as there are innocent people like this suffering grave injustices in gitmo, as long as drones are killing innocent Pakistani villagers, as long as the U.S. brazenly continues to financially and militarily support Israel, the president and every member of congress have blood on their hands.
Let me tell you something, these clowns in office couldn't care less about your or me or the homeless guy on the street. They care about being famous, having money and power and going on free vacations paid for by John Q. average tax payer!
The leadership of this country is made up of citizens of this country. I think John Q. average tax payer would do the same thing if he were in office. Our leadership is a representation of us. The government is made up of US Citizens. We can't just blame the government for it's bad decisions, because in truth it is our decisions.
If we want to change the government, we must first change ourselves. How kind are we to our neighbors, who live across the street?
Listen, people in office have a much greater responsibility than you or me to make the right choices because their decisions affect all of us and that's also why it's incumbent upon us to make these crooks accountable for their actions and to criticize them because, in the words of Howard Zinn "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
It's a shame that the president of our country is out throwing lavish birthday parties for himself inviting useless celebrities and paying a guy $100,000 to play the music. Are you freakin kidding me???? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/05/obamas-birthday-bas...
It mystifies me why this is still going on. I'm sure the President sees the injustice of what's happening. If he doesn't have the political capital to shut the entire operation down, can he at least let selected detainees go free?
What concerns me is that as I understand it, my own country (UK) has been complicit with these detentions. I'm also concerned that the UK and other developed nations have similar black-ops illegal detention centres too, Guantanamo is public knowledge. Are there other centres?
If you feel this is article is a lie and part of a wider political strategy, then present your case. Making sweeping statements without context or reason will not win you friends on HN.
FYI HN doesn't control the links, its users post links and vote on them.
Even worse the quality of comments are very similar to reddit or at least reddit during its decline. These types of political articles are what usually work their way in first as the site degrades.
I am always puzzled about the cognitive dissonance between this and all the (justified) outrage over the Shoah. It's still happening, even in the United States (let's not even talk about Africa, North Korea, etc).
rule of law, right to fair trial, upholding dignity of human kind and the farce of democracy. Feed the rabble with trivia they need to know and all is well.
What did you expect him to say? I am guilty of contributing to terrorism and the purposeful killing of innocent woman and children civilians?
I like how everyone here takes this guys word for everything. It is all a government conspiracy that has put him in there. After all, the US government likes to round up random people around the world and put them in max security detainment as kind of a boredom fighting game right? Go on death row in any detention center in the world and you'll get the same story from about 95% of the inmates there. The government set them up. They are all innocent.
I think that it is always wise to look at everything that your government does with a certain level of suspicion and cynicism, but I also wouldn't bet money on a Gitmo prisoner's "honest" word either.
> I like how everyone here takes this guys word for everything.
It's not very different from the alternative, which is taking the word of whoever put/keeps him there without trial.
Now one of these parties is well-known for enacting cruelties on human beings in situations exactly like these, and the other we really don't know anything about, at all.
Therefore the only right and humane thing to do is to give the latter some benefit of the doubt.
> After all, the US government likes to round up random people around the world and put them in max security detainment
Well yes, such fuck-ups have happened before, as a matter of fact:
And that's just the first example I pulled from the top of Google. There's many more. So truly, there is ALL the reason to assume at least some of the Gitmo prisoners are innocent and kept simply because they are the result of a fuck-up nobody wants to own up to.
> but I also wouldn't bet money on a Gitmo prisoner's "honest" word either.
Why? What do you know about why they are there? There's been no trials, they are only prisoners because the people keeping them say they're guilty of something. So you can't use the fact they are prisoners to decide their honesty, that would be circular reasoning. Both parties have an interest in lying that is almost completely independent of guilt: One has been kept in a secret prison for 11 years subjected to inhumane treatment, and the other side wants to keep a lid on the whole Gitmo thing (maybe even especially if they weren't guilty).
Also, 11 years, man. As I said, you don't know what he did, you don't even know what he's being accused of. Stepping aside from the (very real) possibility of him being completely innocent, what if he did do something, maybe it was terrible, or maybe it was something small and stupid that in no way warrants being locked up in Gitmo for 11 years. And in a year from now you'll have to argue that all those people are guilty of a crime that warrants at least 12 years in a terrible prison, and the year after that, and after that, etc. All the while not having a single clue what these people did, what they are accused of.
It's pretty obvious that at least one of the sides here is guilty.
I appreciate that there may be anger outs people in Gitmo, but they have every right to a trial I have. The double standard of what human rights mean if you are a US citizen and if you aren't makes me physically ill.
As a country, in many ways we deserve the disdain directed at us.
That said, we are not only Gitmo, and we actually do a lot of good things for the world. We just need to get our government to respect our borders.