Hey, so do you guys like it here?
Let’s hope the answer is yes:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 12 ? Senior Defense Department officials said Thursday that they were planning to keep a large portion of the detainees at Guant?namo Bay, Cuba, there for many years, perhaps indefinitely.
The officials spoke as part of a Pentagon effort to counter sharp criticism
by members of human rights groups and foreign governments about the
situation at Guant?namo, where some 650 people, most of them captured in
Afghanistan, are being held under maximum security, some as long as two
years without being charged with any offense. Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld is scheduled to discuss the matter in a speech Friday in Miami. [Emphasis added]
And what better way to counter criticism than to keep people there indefinitely, without legal counsel, and without any appeal except the special begging for release in front of a secret US panel?
“We feel very much like we are in an active war,” said the official,
asserting that the civilian law enforcement model in which people are
prosecuted for crimes or set free did not apply. “What we’re doing at
Guant?namo is more understandable in the war context,” the official said.
Because when you’re at war, then you can do anything. In the 1980s, that meant trading arms for hostages, supplying rebels with arms and training, lying about it and trying to cover the whole thing up. In the early 1990s, it means pardoning those involved (or overturning their convictions on technicalities,) and continuing to pretend you weren’t at any of those meetings (bonjour President Bush I.)
Why does Sadly, No! hate America?
Since we are going to all the trouble of holding people indefinitely, surely we can be more productive about it. I suspect there are uninhabitated islands in the Pacific or Aleutians where that we can have them settle on with some reeducation through labor. Hey it worked for Mao and Stalin. Not to mention these guys like living in camps. They went all the way to Afghanistan to live in them.
“Because when you’re at war, then you can do anything.”
Well, no. Men being men, when you’re at war, certain rules apply — rules of engagement, codified war crimes, Geneva conventions, etc. They don’t apply, however, when it only “feels” like you’re in an active war, or when you’re in a “war-type context,” or when the casualties and consequences are real but the war itself is only a metaphor.
Only when you’re not at war can you do anything you want — and it’s really easy when you’re part of a new breed of brutal bastards.
The real problem with Guantanamo Bay is that it’s too obvious an example of all the freedoms that have made America great.
Great minds think alike, and so do mine and Doug Gillett’s. We have to lock up Muslim guys forever without charging them with anything because they hate our freedom.
Well, at least they will get yearly hearings! Hooray! From the Associated Press:
“Suspected terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay will be allowed to appeal their detentions to a new panel that would determine if they are an ongoing threat to the United States, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Friday.
The panel would hear cases annually to decide whether the suspects remain a threat or could be released, Rumsfeld said in remarks to the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce.
Rumsfeld said the United States was planning to hold many of the detainees ‘as long as necessary.’
‘We need to keep in mind that the people in U.S. custody are not there because they stole a car or robbed a bank,’ Rumsfeld said. ‘They are enemy combatants and terrorists who are being detained for acts of war against our country and that is why different rules have to apply.’
It takes the U.S. government time to determine whether detainees pose a risk, partly because many use aliases and it is not always easy to determine their true identity, Rumsfeld said.”
And maybe partly because they don’t have nearly enough Arabic-language intelligence specialists?
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040213/D80MJTCO0.html
If they are war prisoners the IRX must be allowed to visit them, or the muslim equivalent.