We’ve just basically got a paradox here, because sending them back home would probably increase violence there; but it may be the lesser of the two evils. What do you do?

I know, invade Iran! Keep piling up the love! /snark

I’ve seen it before many times — you are put into a position of going along to get along. I’m not condoning it but believe it is necessary to consider the environment and the morality of the people who are pulling the strings.

Give the wingnuttery until noon on Monday so they can coordinate on their spin. “No, here’s what he MEANT….”

Guantanamo Detainees Are Not Human Beings

presscue.com

On the sixth anniversary of the imprisonment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, a United States judge threw out lawsuit brought by four former British detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse, ruling that the detainees are not “Persons” under U.S. Law, which according to another judge, means that they are less than “human beings”.

(visit the link for the full news article)Guantanamo Detainees Are Not Human Beings

So sad. It would seem that humanity has reached a new low. How does a man who thinks like this ever do well and become a judge in the first place?

This is one of the most sickening articles I have ever seen. Actually using the law to determine someone as ‘less than human’ is disgusting. I’m extremely worried that we’re going to be seeing more of this as an excuse to torture people and treat them…well…like animals.

This is just so sad and hopeless. These poor prisoners have been rotting in Guantanomo since 2001 and they have never had a trial, sentencing or investigation of any kind into their “alleged” crimes – in fact, they’ve never been charged with ANY crime and so their crimes aren’t even alleged.

This is totally against all things that the U.S. stands for.

Yes, this should scare the crap out of people. Knowing where things might be heading…torture and hold someone w/o any habeus corpus, and then justify this by saying that they don’t fit the description of a ‘person’ by U.S. law.

This might just be the beginning of something worse…Wow, that is the craziest kind of logic. I don’t know what this country is doing anymore. I am so tired of the way things seem to be progressing, it might be time for a change.The home of the corrupt, and the land of corporate greed.

What a sad sad world when you can look at someone and judge them to be less than human, or not feel they are deserved of any rights.

Especially if they were innocent.

Can you imagine that? One day your riding your donkey picking poppies, the next thing you know the most ferocious war machine on the planet comes rolling over the mountain. Now you get to spend the rest of your days in a chain-link cage in an alien natural climate, never seeing your family again, and probably not even realizing anything about the “bigger picture.” I wonder if half those guys even heard about 9/11.

your parens “(or Cheney is rather)” open the possibility that we’re not that far apart.

I detest Shrub. I see him as an inherrently selfish and evil liar / spoiled brat (witness his current expedition of peace in the mid east while the newspapers picked up that he’s tellling Israel that he doesn’t believe the NIE and also the announcement that he is authorizing a sizeable sale of arms to Saudi Arabia).

But I still have to look at the relish that the military has taken in carrying out Gitmo. A reluctant general or general with sense of honor could at least slow things down a bit. Yet, despite how much Shrub seems to dislike being contradicted in public, the general makes the above statement in open press.

Even more tragic than if Shrub has done all this of his own doing, would be the even more tragic story of the total idiot being used for 6 years and now being cast aside to take the fall.

-GSD

Should Guantanamo prison be closed?

http://www.youpolls.com/details.asp?pid=1522

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So…nobody gives a shit about people getting tortured and denied a fair trial. It’s the image…

As Gitmo is a military facility, if the joint chiefs were so all fired concerned about the image, the joint chiefs would have considerable power to make sure that certain standards of dignity were followed.

Comment by Max-1 — January 13, 2008 @ 8:56 pm

Funny how you almost never hear Hillary or Barack talk about restoring Habeas Corpus.

It is non-negotiable with me. My line in the sand. If a candidate doesn’t promise to restore Habeas I cannot vote for them.

Without a return of our liberties nothing else matters. The U.S. is just a good place to shop.

It isn’t the physicality of Gitmo that’s become the anathema about the whole thing. It’s the treatment of the prisoners and it’s justification, it’s the denial of due process and it’s justification, it’s the lifting of Habeas Corpus Rights and it’s justification, it’s the lack of proof and charges and it’s justification.

Hell, Gitmo could be in America and the fact remains, the US justice system is failing, miserably! Until there is Habeas Corpus Rights, due process, legal council, trials and evidence, Gitmo, where ever it may be, is still a pock on America.

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WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Friday threw out a suit by four British Muslims who allege that they were tortured and subjected to religious abuse in…Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a ruling that exonerated 11 present and former senior Pentagon officials.

…The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren’t recognized as “persons” under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were aliens held outside the United States…

The court rejected other claims on the grounds that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified that the military officials were acting within the scope of their jobs when they authorized the tactics, and that such tactics were “foreseeable.”

“It was foreseeable that conduct that would ordinarily be indisputably `seriously criminal’ would be implemented by military officials responsible for detaining and interrogating suspected enemy combatants,” Circuit Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in the court’s main opinion.

** Some people aren’t persons and torture was “foreseeable”, therefore you can do whatever the hell to them you like because John Ashcroft said so. Seriously, how much more are Americans willing to take?