What's Next For Guantanamo
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-01-24/whats-next-guantanamo
A Humvee from the Puerto Rico Army National Guard's, 480th Military Police Company, patrols the perimeter of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, Oct. 7, 2009
The administration plans to resume military trials at Guantanamo. New spending curbs by Congress helped derail President Obama’s pledge to close the prison. What's next for Gitmo.
Guests
Jane Mayer
staff writer, "The New Yorker," author of "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals."
John Bellinger
a partner with the law firm of Arnold & Porter and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, former legal adviser for the Department of State under Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Kate Martin
director of the Center for National Security Studies
Comments
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The United States will never be able to "put Guantanamo behind it" until we face up to the fact that torture has been carried out, extensively, in our names.
Other countries are coming to terms with the way they assisted the Bush Administration in secretly detaining people and using torture during interrogation and detention.
We must examine our record of torture and compare it to international and domestic law, and become accountable.
Guantanamo is and always will be a symbol of torture and lawlessness to the rest of the world.
I consider the United States sacred ground.
It is a privilege to be a citizen.
I would not like to see any of the detainees brought into the US for trial.
I believe trials on US soil would create a national security issue and that we would be retaliated on by terrorists ON US soil.
I fear it would springboard another 911 scale attack.
I support keeping Guantanamo open for Military trials.
I see the past decade of administration and Congressional action as seeing the wisdom of Stalin, Saddam, and many other totalitarians, and of Iran and China, in the need for gulags and other extra-judicial methods of handling those who are too dangerous to the regime and current power structure within a nation.
When faced with political threats who are fearless in their opposition to the government, whether a Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, or a bin Laden, they can not be allowed to be free and the government must use whatever means necessary to protect the government. This is the position the Republicans have been especially strong in advocating and that is the reason Republicans are seen as better for the security of the United States.
Recidivism rate? Are we talking about credit card fraud, auto theft or burlglary? How can you possibly compare the two? Gitmo grads are not going back to selling drugs on the street- they're killing innocent civilians as well as our own soldiers.
I belive our justice sistem is one of the best if no the best in the world, base on smart, ready, well preper and well elected people, but our politicians some of them have none of that at all, and they are just looking out for there own interest and the interest of there parties, and because that, they don't even think abaut the people interest and because so they think that our justice sistem can't handle it, but as usual they are wrong.
don't you know that they were here all ready? they don't need to come, we know that, so, we have to be ready to deal wiht them , because if we don't open our eyes to that then we are lost, the terrorist that are a danger to our country are the ones that are walking araund FREE, no the ones that we have in detention, would you like to be in there position?
Since the right wing crowd already knows what to do with these detainees, I suggest that the Justice Dept turn them over to them and make them responsible for them. Glenn Beck can preside over their trial in Arizona or Texas and members of the NRA can be responsible for carrying out Mr. Beck's sentence on national TV. the trial would be short and the payoff for those looking for justice would be immediate. And because it would all be very public, those folks would be the obvious ones responsible for the consequences. Unless of course Mitch McConnell finds a way to spin even abject failure so that it's not the fault of the right.
Indeed, a cornerstone of American jurisprudence use to be that it was far preferable that a hundred guilty persons went free, rather than to wrongly convict and punish one who was innocent.
Beginning essentially with the "law and order" campaigns of Richard Nixon and subsequent Republican presidents, advanced by light-years under George W. Bush under the guise of "national security" and, sadly, continued by Mr. Obama (a former professor of Constitutional Law), that basic precept has entered the dustbin of history - along with the reputation of a once great democratic republic.
One of the stunning national tragedies of our time is the willful ignorance, indeed perversion, of the words carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court Building, "EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW" - which origin is a paraphrase of a decision by Chief Justice Melville Fuller in Caldwell v. Texas, 137 U.S. 692 (1891), in which he wrote, "By the Fourteenth Amendment the powers of the States in dealing with crime within their borders are not limited, but no State can deprive particular persons or classes of persons of equal and impartial justice under the law." (Of course, during the years since Fuller wrote those words, the Supreme Court has decided that the Fourteenth Amendment, and especially its Due Process Clause, do in fact limit the powers of the states in dealing with crime.)
One of your guests stated that no effort was made on site, in Afganistan or Pakistan, to investigate those who were being picked up, to determine whether there was any basis to detain. In fact, the United States has had a policy, established as part of the Geneva Convention, to do just that. The policy assumes that it is more practical and more accurate to make an assessment on site, in order not to detain those who obviously should not be detained. This policy has been implemented since the Korean War.
The reason this was not done with those who became Guantanamo detainees is that the Bush Administration specifically suspended that policy, forbidding the Armed Forces from performing any intelligence, any determination, of the "rightness" of detaining anyone. The policy was shifted, by the Bush Administration, to simply rounding up anyone who was present for any reason, without making any decision about that person on the ground. This was part of the Administration's policy regarding detention.
You cannot treat terrorist suspects as pure criminals, nor POW's.
The issue of the detainees in Guantanamo is that we are trying to fit them into either a military tribunal system or a Civilian court system when their actions and the situations surrounding their actions do not truly fit in either case.
The establishment of the military tribunals was a step to try and create a system for handling the detained terror suspects. There needs to be oversight on this system to make sure that it is as fair as it can be.
Guantanomo and extraordinary rendition is one of many ways the Bush administration has scarred America’s reputation and foreign relations forever. We are no longer on a moral high ground and these practices discredit our servicemen & veterans of previous wars, the constitution, and foundations of which our country was founded.
9/11 offered an extraordinary opportunity to alter the world in a positive way. Americans and the world put differences temporarily behind them and rallied behind America. The course of actions we chose could not have spited or alienated the world against us more, polarize America more, or unite and create more terrorists against us.
Other than that we did good.
In my humble opinion.
Drew Kelly:
You mentioned that 9/11 offered an extraordinary opportunity to alter the world in a positive way.
How do you deal with terrorists that are out to kill you no matter what kind of olive branch you offer them. Terrorists have been around for a long time from all different countries killing and hurting individual citizens. I hope you are not suggesting we sit down have a powwow and go over our differences.
Many of these Islamics terrorists see kindness as a weakness. My goodness terrorism would had continued even without the invasion in these two countries. Read about all the terrorism that took place in the 70's, 80's and 90's
Would like to mentioned that these inmates in Guantanamo were enemy combatants and I do not believe the Geneva Convention covers fighters that are not in uniform. They are usually shot when caught in war.
I would love to see Western Countries unite to defeat these cowards and had more Bushes that had the "juevos" like they say in South Texas to destroy them once and for all.