The President wants to shut down Gitmo. I don't have a problem with that. The previous administration built the prison camp at a remote Naval enclave on the soil of a Communist country where US citizens are forbidden to travel because they knew there would be no oversight. That they wouldn't have to abide by the laws of this nation. That legal representation and the justice system could be circumvented. They have held prisoners there, incommunicado for the better part of a decade. They have denied them any rights what so ever. They have tortured, humiliated and kept them in isolation. They knew when they set it up that the military wouldn't argue and would collude with them. If the government wants to keep political prisoners, they need to follow at least some basic rules of both international and domestic law. If they do that there is no reason to keep them on foreign soil, without outside oversight.
The prison camp at Guantanamo wasn't even enough for the previous administration. They set up a network of secret prisons in hellholes all over the World, where no records at all needed to be kept. If someone died under torture or mistreatment at one of these facilities, there would be no record that they were ever there and thus no accountability or threat of prosecution for crimes against humanity later.
The VFW says that Guantanamo, "is well kept, well run and respectful of human rights". They demand that the President rescind his order to close down the prison camp.
Fuck the VFW for the chickenshit Nazi bastards they are. If we want to keep it open we should use it to incarcerate George Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden and all of the rest of the criminals that perpetrated so many crimes in the name of the American people.
2 comments:
My biggest problem with the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay is that the people in the camp have no legal recourse to set them free if they have been wrongfully detained.
Everyone that wants to keep all of these detainees locked up seems to be willing to take the government's word that every single person that we detain is a really, really bad guy.
I am sure that some of them are people that want to kill Americans. Unfortunately, our government was willing to lock up guilty and innocent alike and had no sense of urgency to free the innocent. That is certainly a big black eye for the United States.
Well, I'm a member both of the ACLU and the VFW. I feel that the VFW is tripping over its dick here.
In the final hours before adjourning in 2006, Congress passed and the president signed the Military Commissions Act (MCA). In doing so, they cast aside the Constitution and the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. They also gave the president absolute power to designate enemy combatants, and to set his own definitions for torture.
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