Guantanamo bay and Obama
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I think the failure in this analogy is assuming that the captured people were fighting to protect their country from us.
Trafik Jamz;255809 wrote:
So hold the trial or Military Tribunal already then. I'm not saying that terrorists or military combatants should not be held, but they should be tried...not under US laws/rules, but under the rules set forth by the Geneva Convention. Not everyone there is a terrorist btw, as far as I can tell it is a POW camp.There is nothing illegal about fighting to protect your country from what you see as an invading force.....think about this, if you lived somewhere other than here (let's say Canada for example) and another country came in and invaded because they didn't like the socialistic nature of Canadian gov't and wanted to instill an islamic based gov't in it's place....would you fight to defend your homeland? I would. Now if you were captured, do you think it would be fair to be labeled a terrorist and held w/o trial and in some cases held w/o a single charge against you? Me either.
DaveH
'94 Supra- 7.77 @ 176mph -
DaveH;255817 wrote:
I think the failure in this analogy is assuming that the captured people were fighting to protect their country from us.And I say that we'll never know unless we put them on trial (military tribunal)
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Trafik Jamz;255825 wrote:
And I say that we'll never know unless we put them on trial (military tribunal)If it were only that simple.
Now I'm not saying I have the answers, but, to believe that a trial will clear everything up is stupid. It is obvious that courts make plenty of mistakes, some are found, many aren't. Those mistakes that are found often times take years to fix. So, some suspected wrongly may be imprisoned/killed for a crime they didn't commit. Some also may be set free due to technicalities or some other political maneuvering and 5 years down the road if/when that person is involved in an attack on American soil/American soldiers/American citizens then people will say WHY DIDN'T WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM WHEN WE HAD THEM IN CUSTODY 5 YEARS AGO?
I believe this is a lose lose situation honestly because you know "bad" things like torture and whatever happen but, at the same time, I don't think people arrive there without having done something above and beyond fighting to defend their country.
If we were imprisoning people over that then all those people you see in videos in Iraq/Afghanistan waving white flags to our helicopters, tanks, and soldiers would be sitting in some prison right now awaiting trial...sorry we don't have the infrastructure to hold those people and I know for a fact we didn't imprison them so the "defending their country" line doesn't really hold water I don't think.
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Like was previously stated, i highly doubt that you end up Guantanamo Bay without having done something very serious. And i also highly doubt that they treat prisoners as bad as our US servicemen are treated when they are captured by insurgent/Al Quida forces. Sometimes in order to protect a nation, like ours obivously needs to be protected, some toes are gonna get stepped on, and we cant be goody two shoes to everyone. Im sure some shit has to be done that not everyone necessarily wants to do, but i think for us and president elect Barak Obama to fail to realize that some of these things need to be done is an extreme show of ignorance as to the way things work in the world, and we will pay dearly for having that point of view.
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You might want to look up Jose Padilla in Wikipedia.
American citizen, captured on US soil, put in Gitmo and held without charges for years.
Right to a fair trial is a pretty big fucking deal.
I'd take 10 more 9/11s before I'd be ok with me or you or some other innocent guy getting thrown in a hole for 5 years and never being charged with anything. Are we the fucking soviet union?
In my America we don't detain people without due process. It doesn't matter where they came from or what we think they might be up to.
Closing GitMo is probably dumb. Changing the rules to allow Gitmo detainees due process is something we should do.
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thrash;255866 wrote:
You might want to look up Jose Padilla in Wikipedia.American citizen, captured on US soil, put in Gitmo and held without charges for years.
Right to a fair trial is a pretty big fucking deal.
I'd take 10 more 9/11s before I'd be ok with me or you or some other innocent guy getting thrown in a hole for 5 years and never being charged with anything. Are we the fucking soviet union?
In my America we don't detain people without due process. It doesn't matter where they came from or what we think they might be up to.
Closing GitMo is probably dumb. Changing the rules to allow Gitmo detainees due process is something we should do.
Couldn't agree more thrash. An excellent post.
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so you just said that you would rather 30,000 innocent people die than one innocent man, who must have done SOMETHING, end up in GT bay? Wow, Chuck, wow.
And GT bay is a far cry from the Gulag, so don't even throw that out there. That's such a BS comparison i can't even start on that one.
It's easy to cry about fair treatment of prisoners and terrorists while you sit in your nice comfy office or home typing away on your computer. Its easy for you and me and everyone to say how it should be, but that is different from what needs to be done. Its sad that we as Americans have gotten so out of touch with what it takes to be able to preserve this lifestyle. You and i have never had to pay the price for what we have.
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I can choose not to visit NYC.
I can't choose to not be kidnapped by black helicopters from US soil.
It's stupid to protect "America" from terrorists if doing so means you stop being America. In America, we don't detain people without charging them, and we don't let them rot in jail for years without getting a trial.
Of course I don't want 30,000 people to die. But it's a false dichotemy I used to illustrate the point: the idea of American justice from the time of Jefferson onward is that it is better for 10 guilty men to walk free than for 1 to be wrongly imprisoned. Free people can defend themselves from guys that the justice system hasn't caught yet. But nobody can defend themselves from a government that has no rules it has to obey.
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I totally agree that they should be given the due process of the law, as we as American citizens enjoy (or are supposed to). But i disagree that GT bay should be closed, as it serves as a vital holding point for known terrorists and their accomplices. Have a fair trial, present evidence, and hang em high if they are guilty.
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I think we're on the same page. I wouldn't making closing Gitmo a priority.
My understanding is that they like to use it because they dont think US law applies there. I think that's wrong and i think we need to lead by example and show that our system is just enough that we'll use it on anyone, no matter where they came from or what we think they did.
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GarageAlchemist;255887 wrote:
so you just said that you would rather 30,000 innocent people die than one innocent man, who must have done SOMETHING, end up in GT bay? Wow, Chuck, wow.And GT bay is a far cry from the Gulag, so don't even throw that out there. That's such a BS comparison i can't even start on that one.
It's easy to cry about fair treatment of prisoners and terrorists while you sit in your nice comfy office or home typing away on your computer. Its easy for you and me and everyone to say how it should be, but that is different from what needs to be done. Its sad that we as Americans have gotten so out of touch with what it takes to be able to preserve this lifestyle. You and i have never had to pay the price for what we have.
Funny, I agree with a post that someone else wrote and I get accused of being the guy saying it. But on principle I do agree, because as thrash has posted I don't want to stop being America to protect America.
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He closed it.
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how about we load em up in a jeep and send em down a long road riddled with roadside bombs?
You may not agree that it should be closed, or that we should keep prisoners without holding a trial. But its all perspective. To them, WE are the terrorists, to us, THEY are the terrorists? Who is right? None are right, and all are right. But they aren't going to stop trying to kill us, so what is it that we should do? I say holding them in a cell is much better than what they would rather do to us.
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In all honesty, I don't think that Gitmo should be closed. I also don't see a point in holding them there indefinitely either. Get the information we need from prisoners or whatnot and either execute them, let them go or charge them with something and lock 'em up. The state of limbo is not necessarily a good thing.
That being said, there is a lot of information that goes into this decision that we are not privy to so any speculation/opinions that we have may or may not be completely accurate.
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GarageAlchemist;257046 wrote:
how about we load em up in a jeep and send em down a long road riddled with roadside bombs?You may not agree that it should be closed, or that we should keep prisoners without holding a trial. But its all perspective. To them, WE are the terrorists, to us, THEY are the terrorists? Who is right? None are right, and all are right. But they aren't going to stop trying to kill us, so what is it that we should do? I say holding them in a cell is much better than what they would rather do to us.
I think the main difference between "us" and "them" is that we never try to kill civilians in wartime nor do we hide behind civilians to try protect ourselves. That is a big difference between how the two sides operate...sure we may be viewed as terrorists to them or whoever but there is a big difference in the way we operate vs the way they do.
MisterCMK;257047 wrote:
In all honesty, I don't think that Gitmo should be closed. I also don't see a point in holding them there indefinitely either. Get the information we need from prisoners or whatnot and either execute them, let them go or charge them with something and lock 'em up. The state of limbo is not necessarily a good thing.That being said, there is a lot of information that goes into this decision that we are not privy to so any speculation/opinions that we have may or may not be completely accurate.
Exactly. We don't know half of the story when it comes to most of this stuff but I think just shutting it down is kind of a short sighted attempt at trying to appease to world and make yourself (referring to Obama) look like you care.
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shit, we pay for it. And its our "elected leader" that makes the decision, so why shouldn't we be privvy to the information that goes into the decision.
The second part of what Dustin said i agree with totally.
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