Forbidden Donut

And now it's closed. (in a year anyway)



Hell. Yes.

Also today, he signed a memorandum that calls on gov't agencies to review Freedom Of Information Act requests with a bias towards release, rather than the opposite, which has been the case for a while now. The third big deal thing of the day was to sign an executive order forcing the CIA to follow the field manual, effectively banning torture.

Making America less like her enemies, one day at a time.
I'm pretty happy so far.

Who knows, maybe in a few years, I will be able to say, "I'm proud to be an American."

I'm proud to be an American. I'm just not proud of America.

What the fuck. I didn't know Obama was left handed. I never would have voted for him.

How sinister.

edit: somehow, there is a crowd of apparently real people, who think this is a terrible thing to do (close gitmo, not be left handed, though I'm sure people like that exist too...)

Can anybody enlighten me as to how this could possibly be a bad thing? Remember, most of the people who've been in Gitmo have been innocent, and a good chunk of the people still there have been cleared of charges and are stuck there because nobody will take them. The biggest problem I see is sorting out who is who and putting them in appropriate existing facilities.

It is the same crew that will say that putting Japanese in camps during WWII was a necessary evil.

I've only ever heard that come from Michelle Malkin. And it was precisely the moment I cordoned her off to that place in my head where I keep people who aren't to be taken seriously.

I think you underestimate people's capacity for cognitive dissonance, though. I'm sure you can find somebody who thinks Gitmo rocks and is keeping us safe and so it should stay, but will say that Japanese Internment was a black mark on our nations history.

I would say that Gitmo keeps us safe. However, I totally disagree with who we have put in there. We should have only put people taken off the battlefield who were shooting at us into Gitmo. Putting Bin Ladins taxi driver in there and those extremists from China makes absolutely no sense.

In terms of the Japanese internment camps, I think its important to judge them in the context of the time. Obviously it is easy for anybody today to see them as morally reprehensible, but if blacks were still second class citizens back then, then we had a huge problem with being racist and thought what we did to the Japanese made perfect sense. I'm sure there is an example of how the internment camps kept us safe, but it is exactly the same as Gitmo, we should discriminate highly who to put into such places so that we arent being unfair. So maybe I could agree with the internment camps if they had limited who they put in them- say any Japanese person who had come to the US within the last 10 years who had been in the Japanese army and had no family in the States yet.

You're right. Fuck liberty.

I think you just said that it's somehow possible to morally violate an innocent person's inalienable right to freedom to afford you some perceived safety, but I'm not sure because that makes no sense.

I'm not saying that standard would be okay to use today but it would have at least been better than the standard they did use back then for putting people in the internment camps and if I lived then I would have been okay with such a standard.

And times of war are different Gov. When the enemy was at the gate of the Roman Republic, the Senate would pick a consul to have unlimited power to make use of to stop the threat. It was considered a civic duty for that person to save the city and then return it to the Senate. They did not want to keep their power (until Caesar that is). So if we used a power during war time that is not normally okay and did it to save our country, then it might be okay. The power must be limited so that we do our best to do our civic duty properly and we must be willing to let go of that power when the threat ends. Japanese internment camps were close to being okay.. they just needed to be limited to serve a better purpose.

Harvey Dent?





Back to the matter at hand.

You can start talking about war time powers when we're actually at war... legally. Til then those are all irrelevant points. It's not a completely indefensible position, but it's really not one that holds water. You'd be better off going with the "what else can we do with them? Gitmo was the cheapest option we have available. Keeping them in the states in a Max Sec Prison will cost 3 times as much!" And then we can just call you argument a difference of priorities rather than an affront to everything that makes this country great.

I spent 10 minutes formulating a response to this, then erased it because I honestly don't think anything I have to say on the matter would change your mind.

Bad things are bad dude. Context is irrelevant.

You'd still be okay with it if you were the one being imprisoned? If the value to security is so evident it should be an easy "yes", otherwise you're full of it.

yes harvey dent lol. i also learned it in my roman republic class but harvey dent said it perfectly.

we were at war during WWII and i was only talking about the context of war for the internment camps.

we are only at war now with al qaeda and picking them off the battlefield and putting them in guantanamo is okay with me. anything else is not okay. the reason we cant just throw anybody who has contact with them into guantanamo is because the threat they pose is nowhere close to as bad as the Japanese posed back then.

and yes if i was a japanese male who had been in the japanese army and came over to the US without a family i might understand being detained if i trusted the US to release me at the end of the crisis.

"Anything else" is exactly what you can expect if you give power unequivocally to your rulers just because you are afraid. That is the problem with that type of thinking.



/shenanigans.

ps.

Funny that your Roman Republic Class taught the same egregious historical error depicted in Christopher Nolan's extremely popular movie /tongue.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":P" border="0" alt="tongue.gif" /> The historical reality much more closely mirror's BushCo's run up to "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in which troops were committed without congressional approval and Colin Powell started waving anthrax around at the general assembly.

I don't know what the historical error is..care to enlighten me?

oh that caesar forced the senate to give him the power instead of rightfully being given it... not a big fucken difference for the purpose i used it for

It is a big fucking difference. The ideal was that people took the power because they had to, not because they wanted to. Cincinatus(Spelled WRONG) was the ideal. Someone taking it forcefully or through coersion is the exact opposite of what it was supposed to be. So you saying that it's "not a big fucken difference" in this case is a big fucking difference, because it shows how you view things. Taking something forcefully isn't a big difference for you, in relation to receiving something temporarily.

You'd make an amazing tyrant.

Yes this is the exact purpose of my using the story. Caesar was cursory to it and I only acknowledged him to show that the ideal was not perfect but had been used properly in the past.

And which situation is most similar to the one we're in today.

Cincinnatus (Spelled WRIGHT!) : Aequeans hold a Roman City hostage, the senate panics and asks probably the least from among them to beat some ass. He promptly does, hangs around for a while receiving accolades (about 18 years or so) and then retires... as an old man. So really he just got bored and gave it back. This WAS a dictatorship.

Caesar: Came back from Gaul with his big ass army. Pompei said that's effed up. You can't come in here with your big ass army! And Caesar said, how bout a little one? And crossed straight into the hood. Then he fucked up Pompei's lieutenants, and was pronounced dictator in Rome, and Mark Anthony his official boy toy. He held the dictatorship for 11 days. He was re elected as a consul and chilled there for a minute and got merked by his boys for being too freakin' popular.

I've had this parallel suggested to me in the past, and I've never been able to see a really good one in either case...

Today: America is attacked by Al-Qaeda, and we go hunting for Bin-Laden in Afghanistan. Then Bush said that Iraq had WMD's. Definitely. Then he committed troops without making a formal declaration of war, bypassing the most fundamental purpose our legislative body can perform in one decision. Then there were no WMD's so we had to make nice and fix what we broke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnatus
The article says Cincinnatus became dictator in 457 BC and he promptly beat the Aequians and resigned from his post within 16 days of getting it, returning to his farm. In 439 BC he was made dictator again to put down a revolt and again resigned.

And no this is not a parallel for today. We are not in dire straights. At the instant we got hit by Japan for WWII, though, some people thought we were in dire straights and completely unprepared for a naval/aerial war. So maybe at that time, suspending peoples' liberties to keep up security might have been okay. I know you don't think so, but that is all I was thinking about.

Hm. I didn't have a Roman history class, but I should have some words with my Latin professor. All the same, yeah, kind of irrelevant to the modern situation. At this point it's just a difference of opinion. I believe, personally, that if you sacrifice your values on the alter of "security" then they stop being values, and so that "security" is an illusion since you already sacrificed that which you wanted to protect. You can believe whatever you wish. I just didn't understand what your point was for bringing up Rome if it wasn't meant to draw a comparison.

more news...

Apparently the case files for Gitmo detainees are all eff'd up. Surprise surprise.

Man, were you off.

Edit: In that you tried to call me out on a falacy, and were incorrect yourself. Everything else though is fine.

Yeah, I should wiki before posting. Shmeh.

Live + Learn

Abuse is up. A few possible explanations. This article suggests that it may be a case of traumatized and "for lack of a better word, barbaric" guards getting their kicks in before it closes down.

Alleged abuses include:
Guards removing or switching ID tags to be harder to identify.
Guards spraying toilet paper with pepper spray
Guards force feeding inmates on hunger strike
Guards putting laxatives in the food being forcefed to inmates
Guards strapping inmates to their seat while they spray diarrhea everywhere from the laxative force-feeding.
Dislocation of joints
"Pre-emptive pepper spraying"
punishment beatings for seeing your lawyer
gestures, comments, interruption of prayer

Gitmo. First we gitmo inmates, then we gitmo allegations of abuse, then we gitmo terrorists (who we make inmates)

So glad this crap is going away.
Also happy that we might start talking to Cuba again about more than military bases.

Isn't that just making more work for yourself?

This one is actually kind of funny in a college-dorm-prank kinda way.

@ KP: Making work for yourself is what people do when they don't have a legitimate amount of work to do.

@ Scabs:

watch out for the cornhole, bud.

It keeps getting more awesome!

http://patdollard.com/2009/03/afghanistan-...eed-from-gitmo/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/us/10git...tml?_r=3&hp

What point are you getting at?

You're a nice wordy person

The fact that you spelled "write" as "wright" in relation to him using "right" - does that type of humor have a term for it? Or would you just make up some nice term like a Contextual Aside?

no point, just adding more information for whoever cares to read it

It was a tongue in cheek way of correcting Bill's (acknowledged) spelling error. No point to the humor. Or would you just make up an ad hominem in relation to a comment made in light of ... ready for this one?... a completely different conversational context?

Eve: Don't play coy, I know you have a point. I'd like to hear you make it yourself, because frankly, I think you might be a more trustworthy and intellectually honest person when it comes to this stuff than Pat Dollard. Also I can engage you in debate, while Pat Dollard lives comfortably in a cloud of internet obscurity.

/ps: WORDS!

well i don't want Guantanamo bay shut down even though i know there are people in there who shouldn't be in there. the rule should be that whoever we captured on the battlefield stays in gb and everyone else deserves some sort of trial. if we catch any of those 60 former detainees that have returned to the battlefield again i am fine with throwing them in gb and calling them enemy combatants and giving them military tribunals. call me stupid for not giving a shit about their rights when we are treating them justly in my opinion.

You had me somewhat intruiged until here.



Justice without rights. Ok.

I won't go so far as to call you stupid, cause I know you're not. I will however call this out as a stark and dangerous misinterpretation of justice.

This is why I would say using the term "enemy combatant" is dangerous. Specifically that when WE say that word it means Al Qaeda and the taliban, while everyone else uses the strict definition. What this means is that while enemy combatant is supposed to define people found on the field who can be dealt with through the normal legal channels, we use it to define anybody who we don't know what to do with, then we do with them as we please. Please recognize that this would be completely unacceptable if the situation were reversed.

You also assume that the 60 GB detainees who are currently involved with our enemies were previously involved with the enemy, an assumption which led to their detainment in the first place, and an assumption that was found to be baseless enough to lead to their release. This kind of assumption is also, unequivocally, dangerous.

Okay I guess I don't give a fk about their full rights under the Constitution that you and I have, because I don't believe they should get those full rights. I am fine with treating them as enemy combatants and I wholeheartedly agree that we fked up the definition of that to our own detriment. The world sees it as wrong and it is wrong to hold people as enemy combatants not caught on the battlefield, but it does not mean that once we sort those people out that GB is still illegal, because it will serve a useful purpose.

Can't completely disagree with you there on any grounds that would alter that opinion. I would like to present an anecdote though.

When my sister and I would fight over who got to play nintendo/with the soccer ball, etc. our mom would overhear us being retarded. She'd come to us and give us this ultimatum:
"If you and your sister can't play nice with the toys I got you, then I'll give them to the _______ children, because they don't have nice things like that."

We proved that we can't play nice with Gitmo. It's high time, IMO, we did what my mother did and held our leadership accountable for those mistakes and perhaps, used the opportunity to teach them that if they abuse a power, even a useful one, then that power can, and will be taken away.

At this point though it's just a difference of opinion. Thanks for being more engaging than pat dollard.

Eh, I'm not so sure that the majority of the people who were responsible for drafting the initial versions of the Geneva Conventions would necessarily disagree with how the US has handled it.

The problem with a number of these "enemy (illegal) combatants" is that they were in large part, violation of(or otherwise operating outside of) those same Geneva Conventions. Best case they're war criminals and should be tried for war crimes.

More typical case is that they fall under what would (then) have been broadly defined as spies & assassins, and would be entitled to the appropriate treatment thereof.... Which is that they get no special protections under the Geneva Conventions of war.

It's the general expectation that is what will happen to our own special forces when they're doing (deep) black ops. If they get caught, even though they were carrying out a military operation... Since they were (very likely) out of uniform and presumably attempting to carry out their (hostile) mission while blending in with the population(not to be confused with military personal in escape/evasion/general GTFO mode; its OK to not be in uniform when you're trying to get away/escape back to your own side... It isn't ok to be doing that when you're getting ready to/are in the process of #@$%ing things up), they're not supposed to get any legal protection to speak of.

Of course, the "other side" of this particular problem is that the initial rounds of the Geneva Conventions were written when there still was a general parity in the capabilities of both sides to fight/wage war. That no longer is the case where the United States in particular is concerned. So some of the concepts of warfare that it codifies would be absolutely insane for anyone on the other side(vs the US) to try to abide by, at least if they want their capabilities to stand a chance of surviving long enough to do damage to a "main body" of US forces.

I understand that in a legal sense, the people we're rounding up and throwing in GB are very difficult to deal with. I'm not entirely sure what the right thing to do with them is, like most people. What I do believe, is that it was the 100% wrong thing to call them by a name which is so poorly defined as to have no legal meaning whatsoever so that we could throw people into a prison which we specifically made sure wasn't in America so we could torture them with impunity. Not that we are, but we could have been, and we did ... at least a little.

I'm fine with the war crimes thing. At least then they get a trial, and hopefully people who were gathering explosives to strap to their nephews chest would be found guilty, and people who were driving their grandma to the mosque on the wrong day might be found innocent.

I like how if you want to kill somebody and get away with it you just have to toss on a uniform so the other side can do it back.

Humanity is a silly thing.

If you had Ahmed Ghailani in the pool for First Detainee on American Soil. Come collect your prize.

Here I posted an article I read about Ahmed getting convicted for terrorism.

Here I removed this article upon recognizing that the Ahmed in question was from Atlanta.

Apologies.

/mellow.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":mellow:" border="0" alt="mellow.gif" />

I figured that would be less confusing than having to retract it after 4 or 5 posts pointed out the error.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/20...in-bermuda.html

Seems totally random that they are going to Bermuda but the Uighurs are definitely a group of detainees in GB deserving of release.

Whoever will take 'em man. Whoever will take 'em.

Frankly I don't know what the problem with giving them US amnesty would be, but I'm sure we'd hear John Boehner shit himself clear from DC.

Day Futhermuckin' ... ugh... 180 something...

LAAAAAAME.

For me, he gets until 1/20 before I plan on letting delays get under my skin, but this is one that will easily sway my vote away from the man if he just lets this issue quietly drop off of the radar. To be fair, it's just the reports outlining the plans surrounding the closure of the base, but still... if that falls behind, the closing falls behind. And that's balls.

more lameness

More delays expected.

At least the administration's being upfront? shmeh.