Obama Signs Orders Closing Guantanamo, Halting Harsh Interrogations

associate
Jan 22, 2009 11:03 AM CST

So he’s closing Gitmo, except it’s not closing this year, or maybe even next.  And when it does close, all of the prisoners will go to a new jail, along with the current guards.  And then, the trial will resume under Obama’s directive instead of Bush’s.  Change of location has indeed come.

I guess it’s a moral if hollow victory?

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dave romine
Jan 23, 2009 7:48 AM CST

I think associate and JD have it wrong.  The point is not so much whether the prisoners believe their trials are fair as whether the world thinks so and whether they really are fair.  I think the answer to both will be yes.

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JFK
Jan 23, 2009 10:25 AM CST

Glad we’ll be able to try them here.  That way, we can reveal all of our intelligence techniques publicly like we did in the trial of the ‘93 WTC bombers that we were listening to Al Quaeda cell phone conversations and they immediately stopped.  (Wonder if we could have prevented 9/11 if that hadn’t happened.)  Also, we need to be sure that our soldiers can call time out on the battlefield to read POWs their Miranda rights and gather evidence as if they were policeman at the scene of a crime.

Obama is finidng out that casual blithely made campaign rhetoric is not the same as governing.  Hope he can be serious about this.

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Andy the Lawyer
Jan 23, 2009 10:57 AM CST

Responding to #6—They might be terrorists.  they might not.  That’s what trials are for—to sort them out. 

Reminder—In the past 6 years, the Bush administration released more than 800 Gitmo prisoners.  this is a massive admission that just because someone’s been incarcerated and charged doesn’t mean the charges are valid.  Also, at least 60 of the present Gitmo inmates were slated by the Bush administration for release because they were determined to NOT be terrorists, once a country is found to accept them.  Is JFK suggesting that they’re really terrorists too, regardless of what the Bush administration decided?

As for Geneva Convention rights—JFK needs to re-read the USSC’s Boumedienne decision of last year.

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Andy the Lawyer
Jan 23, 2009 12:17 PM CST

JFK—Presumably we know this because we killed them there first. 

Your logic, as applied to ordinary non-terrorist criminals, would require the permanent imprisonment of convicts whose sentences have been served just because some convicts, when released, go on to commit more crimes.  Sorry—that’s not America.

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Chesty Puller
Jan 23, 2009 3:38 PM CST

Comment removed by moderator.

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B. McLeod
Jan 23, 2009 8:09 PM CST

The rules of war are sometimes counter-intuitive.  In Vietnam, there were “free fire zones.”  You could whip over one in a helicopter gunship and exterminate any and every living thing.  You could drop napalm in there wherever you wanted.  No charges and no questions asked.  On the other hand, if some butter-bar lieutenant, after taking fire from a village, went into that village and was seen to shoot an unarmed villager with his sidearm, that was a courts martial.  Sometimes it can be hard to sort those things out, and soldiers in the ranks soon learn to be careful.  Orders for questionable killing tend to not be in writing, and later (as with Abu Ghraib) captains and majors and such have no idea why their enlisted soldiers took those inappropriate actions.  Generals and politicians never know either, and their prints will never be on it when someone tries to trace responsibility back.  Hence, I am not prepared to make any criticism of those soldiers who decide to follow their training and take prisoners where the rules of war say to take prisoners.  And # 11, regardless of whatever you said that the Moderator had to remove, I can tell you Chesty Puller (God be due to him) would agree with me.

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