I'd Like to Say Something about Closing Gitmo

[bennmorland]

Guantanamo Bay is an embarrassment to the principles we as a nation's citizenry are meant to uphold. Before we can begin to keep our heads up high, we must recognize that the government is servile to the Constitution, and the Constitution forbids government from pursuing indefinite waivers of certain fundamental judicial procedures, meant to

Comments

[mlledesade]

Word.

[bennmorland]

For shizzle.

[mlledesade]

My nizzle (wizzle, mizzle?).

[blackballoon]

Yay. ♥ You could be a politician. :D

[bennmorland]

But I have a soul!

Gitmo

[hankr]

Like most of life, Gitmo is not simple. In all wars, captured prisoners of war do not generally have any due process rights; they are held as enemy combatants until the war is officially over. Certainly the nazi and japanese prisoners in ww2 just sat it out. The difficulty today is identifying who the enemy combatants are, what the war actually is, and when it will be over. Establishing combatant status is what the tribunals are supposed to be about. Since the status of the 'detainees' isn't yet determined (That is, have they engaged in acts of war against US troops?), they are being given some due process rights, but not those that would be given to you or me in a civil court here in the good old US of A. It's a recognized tenet of international law that enemy combatants don't have due process rights, but we have to sort out the bad guys from those who got caught up in the mess.

Who was it that said, "Shoot them all and let God sort everything out."?

Re: Gitmo

[bennmorland]

As always, your points cause me to refine mine, which is something I miss terribly up here on Northern Virginia

Re: Gitmo

[bennmorland]

An amendment I had intended to include in above reply, but lost sight of as I rambled on.

If the executive wishes to invoke war powers, let it do so, per the Constitution, by beseeching Congress into declaring a state of war against these organizations bent on destruction. Then the president may declare Guantanamo and its environs outside the realm of law as we know it, suspend habeas corpus, and execute men for such varied things as desertion and treason. The men involved in the recent New York plot, as American citizens or permanent residents, are eligible for charges of treason, the only crime defined in the Constitution, but only if we as a nation are in a declared war. So let us declare war, and execute the plotters. I wouldn't be opposed to that. Not at all. And let us do this with all Americans who believe they owe more to a perverted religio-political philosophy than to the country that has sheltered and raised them. Hang 'em all, let God sort it out

Re: Gitmo

[hankr]

An excellent dialogue. But, de facto excreta bovinum? Cave excreta hobbit. E pluribus bovinum. Et cetra ad infinitum

[orange_fell]

Good for you for not being one of the many who would sacrifice liberty for a little temporary security.

Also, happy belated birthday.

[bennmorland]

Thank you, and thank you!