I completely agree with you TM... I don't know what kind of impact 911 would have had on me if I were the president. But I still can't understand why the govt can't afford detainees council. Even if it's a military "public defender" type. And yes, Ashcroft is a fascist Here's a logical plan... quit buying military equipment that we don't need (Osprey, Star Wars, etc.), quit the tax cuts for the wealthy, and concentrate on human intelligence, DOHS reform, port security, and airport security. There, and it's all paid for with the money that my plan cuts.
Are you saying that people that pay a proportionate amount of their income should not get the same proportion back. That sounds like what Al Gore calls Fuzzy math. LOL.
Aphie, You did get me thinking about the prisoners in Gitmo Bay. I did some research online. There are about 650 people there still. There seems to be something fishy about it since the UN is upset about possible human rights violations. I would not even pretend to know what exactly was going on. Think back to WWII and the Japanese detention camps. They all were let go once the war was over. The war in Afghanistan is over now. So why have they not been legally processed? Are they criminals? Or were they just defending what they thought was right? Or are they terrorists? Were they in the wrong place at the wrong time?
It pisses me off because we spent a whole semester of history class talking about how sad of a time is was in American history when we detailed Japanese people because of their race (and also the communism McCarthysim period) and here we are repeating history yet again.
aphie, Maybe the thing that should piss you off is you got a biased view of history from your professors. It is easy to criticize the Japanese internment from the safety of 60 years later, but people were terrified at the time of a possible Japanese invasion, assisted by fifth columnists. As for McCarthy, just read Ann Coulter's book. Bottom line, he was right, communists had infiltrated government. The gitmo detainees are either terrorists or terrorist supporters. They have no legal right to counsel or anything else. And the fighting in Afghanistan is far from over.
If that is the case, then why have none of them been charged with any crimes? If they have no legal right to counsel, then what legal right do we have to detain them without appropriate review of international law and international courts? The United States cannot just detain anyone from the world under the catch-all phrase "enemy combatant" and expect the rest of the world to say, "oh, ok, no problem." We're just one country out of many others that make up the entire world. What gives our society and culture precedence over any other?
what's this "we" shit, white man?? never before in my life time have i seen an administration whom the american public despises as much as this one...myself included. they are an embarassment to this great country, and hopefully the rest of the world will forgive us when their time is up. sadly, i feel as though the terrorists have already won -- they've allowed a wacked group of neocon criminals to subvert the constitution. fortunately, november 2004 will kick those piles of shit back to texas, wyomin' and missourah... PS - great pic, madison.
They were not "arrested" and they are not part of the criminal justice system. You may not approve of what's going on, but they were not just picked up at random. They were trying to kill our soldiers in Afghanistan and keep in power the Taliban regime that had turned that country back past the middle ages while giving a sanctuary to the people who planned 9/11. If the "rest of the world" has a problem, that's too bad. We decide what's best for our security, not France.
Good grief. Comparing the internment of Japanese-American CITIZENS of this country during WWII to ex-Taliban fanatics who tried very hard to kill our soldiers and succeeded in such lovely acts as stoning women to death on a regular basis, turning their society back to the middle ages, and harboring and abetting Bin Laden - is ridiculous. It is an insult to those interned Japanese-Americans, whose only "crime" was to have ancestral ties to a country that was at war with the US. For this they lost their homes, businesses, farms, and were often accosted, beaten, and treated like scum in public. Yet the most highly decorated Army unit in WWII was the 442nd Regiment, composed of, you guessed it, Japanese-American troops. When we start locking up Arab-Americans en masse, drag them out of their homes, take over their businesses, and treat them like cattle for a few years, then you can start crying about a rebirth of the 40's.