Obama Seems Intent On Finally Closing Gitmo For Good

[MarcATL]

I think he will?

Do you think he'll succeed?

Do you want him to be successful in that endeavor?

 

[AmyNation]

He does?


He had a nice sound bite at a press conference after a reporter brought it up, I don't see the as "intent on closing Gitmo".

 

[boedicca]

The poll choices are inadequate.

Yes - Obama seems intent on blaming Congress for his failure to keep his campaign promise to close Gitmo and on ignoring the fact that he has kept it open for 4+ years.

 

[High_Gravity]

As long as we are still fighting a war on terror I say leave it open.

 

[BreezeWood]

the point he made for closing the base is to prevent gov't incarceration without formal charges ... an affront to the US Constitution.

 

[MarcATL]

The main question is do YOU support the closing of Gitmo.

Yay or nay?

 

[Circe]

The art of politics is delay.

Oobop isn't going to close Gitmo.

He'll wait and let the next guy take the heat for letting go the prisoners of war. After they're a little older, a little wiser, ...and a lot more crippled up with arthritis.

Besides, we need it for the next time. And there WILL be a next time. They'll keep it open, be sure. Just looming and waiting, like the Chateau d'If for the next Edmund Dantes/Count of Monte Cristo.

Call it a prisoner-of-war camp for just-in-case. Works for me.

 

[Circe]

As long as we are still fighting a war on terror I say leave it open.

Yeah.............I agree. I'm okay with letting the current prisoners of war go home, or somewhere not here, in accordance with quite normal rules of war.

But we're going to need it again, for more prisoners of war. So keep it open. We could have them here, like the German camps in Texas during WWII, but better not. The site is a good one, and already developed. And it keeps a foothold in Cuba.

Every country in every war always had prisoners of war camps!! Unless they carefully didn't TAKE any prisoners. After the war, you let them go. That's the rule. Preferably NOT all blinded except one in ten to lead them home......the Persians did that, supposedly.

 

[Truthmatters]

Obama has been trying to close it for years.

The republicans fight every effort

 

[MarcATL]

Obama has been trying to close it for years.

The republicans fight every effort

Then they turn around and say assinine things such as...

"Well, look see, Obama didn't close Gitmo like he said he would. He broke his promise...why do you still support him?"

As if they WANT/ED him to close Gitmo.

Hence my question is straight and to-the-point...do you support the closing of Guantanamo Bay, yes or no?

 

[kwc57]

I think he will?

Do you think he'll succeed?

Do you want him to be successful in that endeavor?

Wasn't he going to do that back in 2008........and did nothing. The problem with having an unquaified candidate is that they don't understand the reality of the job they seek. Once he was elected and his eyes opened to what we are up against as opposed to his rhetoric and uninformed bullshit, he understood the need for such a place. Hence, he has never closed it. He's just tossing a little red meat out to his lapdogs to keep them satisfied. When he leaves office, Gitmo will still exist just like a depressed economy and unemployment.

 

[High_Gravity]

Alot of the inmates in Gitmo come from countries that don't want them back, that is a big issue too.

 

[boedicca]

Considering how Obama has used the permanent bureaucracy of the Executive Branch to go around Congress on a number of fronts, if he REALLY wanted to close GITMO, his tendency to abuse power would have enabled him to do so.

 

[Claudette]

The main question is do YOU support the closing of Gitmo.

Yay or nay?

Nay. Gitmo is the best place for these dirtbags.

No one wants them in the US and I for one would like them all to drop dead.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Even if he closes it will he stop the policy of indefinite detention and let the people in Gitmo go home? Doubt it.

 

[Circe]

Alot of the inmates in Gitmo come from countries that don't want them back, that is a big issue too.

I was reading on another thread that a lot of that is Yemen: their prisons are a joke, 30 at a time escape at regular intervals, or are simply let out. So we can't send them back to Yemen if they are really dangerous. And a lot of the worse terrorists are in Yemen: that's why we keep drones flying all the time there trying to bomb people.

It is a problem. Some of them are ACTIVE warriors, not prisoners of war from a lost and gone war. Those we could let out. Yemenese are still fighting, however. Better keep them locked up. No force-feeding. That would be so....................unkind.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Obama has been trying to close it for years.

The republicans fight every effort

The instant Guantánamo is mentioned, the people in the faction who spent years denouncing it as a Great Evil now instead rush to exonerate President Obama for any responsibility or blame. They insist that the fault rests with Congress for preventing Obama from fulfilling his pledge to close the camp.

I've written many times before why this claim, though grounded in some truth, is misleading in the extreme. I won't repeat all of that here; click the links and read the documentation proving its truth. In sum, Obama sought not to close Guantánamo but simply to re-locate it to Illinois, and in doing so, to preserve what makes it such a travesty of justice: its system of indefinite detention. The detainees there are not protesting in desperation because of their geographical location: we want to be in Illinois rather than a Cuban island. They are sacrificing their health and their lives in response to being locked in a cage for more than a decade without charges: a system Obama, independent of what Congress did, intended to preserve. Obama's task force in early 2010 decreed that "48 detainees were determined to be too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution" and will thus "remain in detention": i.e. indefinitely imprisoned with no charges. Given these facts, one cannot denounce the disgrace of Guantánamo's indefinite detention system while pretending that Obama sought to end it, at least not cogently or honestly.

Obama, Guantanamo, and the enduring national shame | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Alot of the inmates in Gitmo come from countries that don't want them back, that is a big issue too.

Yemen wants their imprisoned nationals back, especially the ones who have been exonerated of any crime.

 

[candycorn]

I think he will?

Do you think he'll succeed?

Do you want him to be successful in that endeavor?

You need to broaden the point.

Closing the prison is one thing. I don't think it should be closed "persay" (sp?). If we need a temporary facility to hold persons who have committed extra-legal or persumably extra-legal acts of violence; we should keep it available to us either in the form or Gitmo or some other "black site".

But anyone who is there for more than 2 weeks or so should be on a track through our criminal or military justice system to either get a trial or a bus-ticket home.

Could you imagine being locked up and the warden saying "We'll get to you when we get to you?" We have more people in jail than nearly anyone else at any other time in the history of the world...we're very good at keeping people behind bars. We don't need to go rogue and think of other ways to persecute people.

 

[Circe]

we should keep it available to us either in the form or Gitmo or some other "black site".

But anyone who is there for more than 2 weeks or so should be on a track through our criminal or military justice system to either get a trial or a bus-ticket home.

No, I can't agree with that and no country has EVER agreed with that! If you let out soldiers fighting against you after two weeks, guess what they do? They get together and continue the war, of course, this time on YOUR territory! That's a lot of the problem with these guys: do they believe the war is over? Or not? We SURE don't want them here.

Prisoners of war NORMALLY spend four or more years in camps: that happened all over the world in WWI and WWII, thousands and tens of thousands, years. Our Civil War. Every war, prisoners spent years in prison camps, if prisoners were taken; they often weren't, of course. In the early days, they were just killed, too dangerous to enslave in the normal way. Millions killed by the Romans, up close and personal, with swords. And after that, they didn't have so much problem with the Gauls........"They create a wilderness and call it peace." Tacitus.

You really do have to wait till the war is completely over before you let them out!