You watch documentaries on Frontline where there are hundreds of Taliban gathered, raising their rifles in the air, and you wonder, if they could make this film why can't they pop one in right there?
I never could figure out how the right wing could be up in arms about the authorities yanking those kids off the Jeffs ranch and yet support GitMo.
That's progress for someone who had this to say a while ago about the possibility of Obama becoming president.
Obama did precisely what he should have done on Gitmo. You know, it's all smoke and mirrors. We have not sent new inmates to Gitmo in years, and all the guys currently there will just be moved to Bagram and left to rot. If we really get into this, perhaps we'll arrange for them to be "tried under Afghan law" or some other sham. Either way, the remaining prisoners aren't going to be strolling down Main Street anytime soon. Closing Guantanamo has zero practical effect, but it's a great pro-US propaganda tool. And that's just fine with me.
Great post. By the government's own admission (the Bush Admin, at that), there may be 100 potentially serious inmates at Gitmo. In fact, even top military officials concede that potentially a MAJORITY of those held there were peasants in picked up in the general theater of the battlefield in Afghanistan, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time - some of whom were friggin' poppy farmers (yea, yea, big deal - the CIA pays poppy farmers all the time and allow cultivation to go on right now), sheppards, whatever. If the evidence is there, charge them up the ass and try them and convict them. It's not like they're going to be getting sympathetic jurors as long as the government has anything stronger than a case built on a house of cards. Shutting Gitmo is a brilliant move, along with the other initial moves Obama is making, as it is all part and parcel of the impression of a fresh start in fighting our new wars or challenges or whatever term you want to use for them in an intelligent, cost-effective and consensus-building way - a way that no nation in the world can constructively criticize us for; in fact, in a way that no nation in the world, with a few, crazy exceptions, wouldn't want to join us in the endeavor.
Bush had Poland. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/mahTGNIk4q4&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/mahTGNIk4q4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
This is what we get for electing GWB as our president: staggering incompetence both ways. First we scoop up Afghan peasants largely at random and make a big show of it, though it's done in such a way that nobody can really be sure if any of them are guilty of anything. Then Bush decides he can imprison anyone he likes for as long as he likes and shits on a thousand years of legal tradition, leading to a backlash and massive pressure to release prisoners and shut the place down. Finally, we release a few guys who turn out to be genuine Al-Qaeda members. But, you know what they say. "Better to let a thousand guilty men go free..."