posted May 02, 2013 01:11 AM              

i went back and looked a little. i had forgotten a lot of this stuff...the order to close gitmo was written in the first couple of days he held office, jan 09.

congress and hysterical locals along with the anti-obama fox/limbaugh media combined to thwart the execution.

it always makes me wonder when people talk about this BROKEN PROMISE of obama's what people think actually goes on in washington and around the country.

executive orders are not royal decrees. they require the cooperation of the purseholders and bill writers in congress, and then public opinion can still be whipped up to a frenzy against something. when a location was selected the conservatives howled about the folly of bringing these "terrorists" - most of them innocent! - to our own backyards, and the locals louder than any.

posted May 02, 2013 10:06 AM            

quote:

---

If I remember right, it was a refusal to go through with any of the sensible suggestions as to what to do with the prisoners. Members in congress didn't want them on U.S. soil, nor did they want them on a remote island in the Pacific.

---

A steaming hot cup of N O
has been served up since day 1.
I am continually astonished that any
reforms whatsoever have been passed.

The quickest reform of all tho
~due~ to sequestration
long waits at the airports you heard about that right?

Well, congress had trouble with the long waits too,
and within days put legislation forward to put monies back & air traffic controllers back to work......

go figure

posted May 02, 2013 10:18 AM            

quote:

---

Well, congress had trouble with the long waits too, and within days put legislation forward to put monies back & air traffic controllers back to work......

---

While unemployment cuts remain and services to the poor are standing alone. Sad.

posted May 02, 2013 04:14 PM            

quote:

---

While the detainees have been trying to protest being held indefinitely without charges, the military is trying to keep Guantanamo guards focused on the idea that the detainees are terrorists who need to be locked up.

Some of the military personnel now at Guantanamo are as young as 18, and were just children when the Sept. 11 attacks took place. To bring them up to speed, and to give those deployed to Guantanamo a better sense of why they’re there, FBI counterterrorism officials hold periodic unclassified briefings open to members of the military. A recent April briefing, which helped explain the role allegedly played by five detainees on trial in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, featured recordings of 911 calls from victims in the World Trade Center, which attendees said left many participants in tears.

Additionally, guards at Guantanamo -- like all other members of the military -- are barred from doing their own research on Wikileaks, and in theory any news websites that present information from Wikileaks. Such research may tell them more about the detainees. The consequence of accepting the government's side of the story and excluding everything else is a strict us vs. them mentality.

“Many of the guards are not informed about the details of the situation at Guantanamo or the legal process of it, that there are some people who are cleared for release. They’re kept away from all that,” said Omar Deghayes, a former Guantanamo detainee who was released in 2007 after a five-year incarceration. “They tell them these are the worst of the worst. All they know is ‘Oh, these people are connected to Sept. 11.’ That’s the mindframe.”

"We have the keys at the end of the day, they are on the other side of the cell,” states a sign hanging in the Camp Six observation room, where guards monitor detainees via cameras.

That is an excerpt of a fascinating report from Guanatanamo by Ryan Reilly. He quotes one of the guards kvetching that these prisoners had it a lot better than the Louisiana prisons he worked in as a civilian.Considering that Louisiana prisons are notorious hellholes, that's hardly a useful comparison. But then this fellow (an officer...) apparently doesn't know that many of these prisoners are innocent of any crimes and are being held indefinitely because Americans are a bunch of pants-wetting, panic artists who have convinced themselves that if they just try hard enough they can kill or imprison everyone who hates us and then we will all be safe forever. It's obscenely absurd.

And, by the way, the torture continues:

Fayiz al Kandari, one of the detainees being force-feed, complained through his lawyer, Carlos Warner, that medical officials were using a feeding tube that was too large, and that he was not able to breathe. He said that his request for the doctors to use a smaller tube was denied.

Roughly two-thirds of those being force-fed “accept their nutritional supplement voluntarily,” according to House, meaning the emaciated men don’t actively fight the inevitable. Even those detainees who cooperate are strapped down into a chair with built-in restraints for the arms, legs and torso. Those who refuse to go to the medical facility are strapped to their beds and force-fed inside their cells.

“It’s not a violent resistance,” one medical staffer in Camp Six said the day reporters visited. Nevertheless, medical personnel are accompanied at all times by guards in riot gear...

While there are potential health risks to force-feeding -- collapsed lungs, infections, pneumonia -- the military in theory may continue the practice for years. One detainee at Guantanamo has been force-fed daily since 2005.

(And yes, that is torture, with ramifications for medical personnel, guards and prisoners.)

Read the whole thing if you can stand it. The administration defenses for all this are lame and unconvincing.

Well, to everyone who isn't a complete dope, that is:

Gitmo must go, but where? That's the scare. Move the prisoners where you can put on trial to the states. Okay. But the republicans won't agree with that. not in my backyard, they say. Or send the prisoners we can't put on trial to other countries. But what country is willing to take them or I should say, what country do we trust to keep an eye on them? This is a real problem. In the old days we released prisoners of war when the war was over. They go home. When is this war going to be over? This war on terrorism? If they were simply criminals, we could incarcerate them and then let them go. When are we able to release people that are determined to go to war the day they get out. I'm open to new ideas.
I have a new idea, Chris. Why don't you stop talking for a couple of minutes and think about what you are saying. It makes no sense. Is it really acceptable that we have a bunch of prisoners we cannot charge, try or convict but who nonetheless can be assumed to be determined to go to war with us the day they get out of prison? How the hell do you know that?

So, while we might not have any evidence but we just "know" they are guilty and therefore we can never let them go until the War on Terrorism is over. Chris would like to know when that will be. Me too. But I'm going to guess never. This would be darkly funny if it wasn't the official policy of the US Government. They have declared that certain prisoners are just going to have to indefinitely stay in prison without trial somewhere. Sure, we'd like to be able to imprison them indefinitely in a prison that isn't Guantanamo because well ... I don't know why. What the hell difference does that make? But we just do. The only question is where they're going to molder for the rest of their lives --- or until we can all celebrate VGWOT-Day, which is never.

And hey, it's not like there aren't other prisoners we'd really, really love to set free, it's just that we can't trust them not to be mad about destroying their lives based on lies so we need to make sure they either rot in some foreign prison or are "watched" carefully for the rest of their lives and we can't find anyone that's willing to do that dirty work for us. Bummer.

For a more in-depth look at the rigid inability to grasp what's going on here, check out his interview with two experts earlier in the show.

In case you are unaware of the official 2011 Obama administration executive order on this:

President Obama signed an executive order Monday that will create a formal system of indefinite detention for those held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who continue to pose a significant threat to national security. The administration also said it will start new military commission trials for detainees there. The announcements, coming more than two years after Obama vowed in another executive order to close the detention center, all but cements Guantanamo Bay's continuing role in U.S. counterterrorism policy.

Administration officials said the president is still committed to closing the prison, although he made no mention of that goal in a short statement Monday. The administration's original plans to create a detention center in the United States and prosecute some detainees in federal court have all but collapsed in the face of bipartisan congressional opposition. The executive order recognizes the reality that some Guantanamo Bay detainees will remain in U.S. custody for many years, if not for life.

The new system allows them the prospect of successfully arguing in the future that they should be released because they do not pose a threat. "Today, I am announcing several steps that broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions and ensure the humane treatment of detainees," Obama said in statement. "I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system - including [federal] Article III Courts - to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened."

But activists on either end of the debate over closing the prison cast the announcement as a reversal. "It is virtually impossible to imagine how one closes Guantanamo in light of this executive order," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "In a little over two years, the Obama administration has done a complete about-face." Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the order vindicated Obama's predecessor. "I commend the Obama Administration for issuing this Executive Order," he said in a statement. "The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush Administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities."

---

posted May 02, 2013 04:58 PM            

quote:

---

It's a public relations ploy. If you think Obama intends on closing that place, you are truly gullible.

---

If your first sentence is right, then you wouldn't be gullible to think that he'd want to close it. You'd think, "Of course he wants to close it. Anyone in the world with a sense of justice would welcome that news. That would be an international moment of goodwill that Obama helped achieve."

posted May 02, 2013 08:15 PM            

Also, it's not he who determines who is a terrorist.

a former White House lawyer claimed that drone strikes are being used as an alternative to detaining al-Qaida suspects. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/02/force-feeding-guantanamo-bay-obama

Drones are the alternative to bringing terrorists to GITMO according to that former White House lawyer.

Speaking to the Guardian, Emmerson, who has also questioned the legality of US drone strikes, said: "President Obama's announcement that he will renew and redouble his efforts to close Guantánamo as soon as possible is a highly positive indication. His administration has been committed to this policy since he was first elected, but he has been blocked by Republicans in the senate taking advantage of the toxic state of US politics … [Obama] knows, as all informed observers know, that if the hunger-strikers at Guantánamo starve themselves to death, the threat of reprisal against the US will be immediate and significant.

"Any further Republican attempts to block the president's renewed move to close [Guantánamo] will place the lives of US citizens at immediate risk all over the world." http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/02/force-feeding-guantanamo-bay-obama

posted May 03, 2013 02:04 AM            

Yeah, this sums it up:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/dispatches/2012/02/13/obama-terror-policy-and-bipar tisan-consensus/

I especially like Greenwald said here:

quote:

---

Greenwald: The Democratic Party owes a sincere apology to George Bush, Dick Cheney and company for enthusiastically embracing many of the very Terrorism policies which caused them to hurl such vehement invective at the GOP for all those years. And progressives who support the views of the majority as expressed by this poll should never be listened to again the next time they want to pretend to oppose civilian slaughter and civil liberties assaults when perpetrated by the next Republican President (it should be noted that roughly 35% of liberals, a non-trivial amount, say they oppose these Obama policies).

One final point: I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy and the other party pretends to oppose it — as happened with these radical War on Terror policies during the Bush years — then public opinion is divisive on the question, sharply split. But once the policy becomes the hallmark of both political parties, then public opinion becomes robust in support of it. That’s because people assume that if both political parties support a certain policy that it must be wise, and because policies that enjoy the status of bipartisan consensus are removed from the realm of mainstream challenge. That’s what Barack Obama has done to these Bush/Cheney policies: he has, as Jack Goldsmith predicted he would back in 2009, shielded and entrenched them as standard U.S. policy for at least a generation, and (by leading his supporters to embrace these policies as their own) has done so with far more success than any GOP President ever could have dreamed of achieving.

---

Still, the ACLU (and also some libertarian organizations) have remained consistent, unlike the partisans who change their values & standards to whatever is most convenient depending on which party is doing it at the time. Even Cenk Uygur (Young Turks) keeps calling Obama on this yet liberals who normally love to quote his bad mouthing the Republicans don't post it when he bad mouths his liberal viewers for such blatant hypocrisy. (Plenty of other liberal commentators have been talking about Obama's actions and the "deafening silence" by mainstream liberal Democrats the entire time, too. But they get ignored when they do, too.)

For those wondering why they're such hypocrites and why they actually believe their own shifting values, there has been brain scans that help explain it, which you can see here: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11009379/ns/te chnology_and_science-science/t/political-bias-affects-brain-activity-study-finds/#.UYNTzsqK0xw

quote:

---

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered

---

quote:

---

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning.

---

posted May 03, 2013 04:58 AM              

Surely that is not too complex for the great minds around here?

I still disagree with jwhop snd everyone who say that keeping gitmo open is right and proper and that terrorists deserve inhumane treatment.

Especially when they aren't even terrorists. That doesn't mean that obama is pretending when he says he wants to close it.

You seem STILL to think that being president is like owning a small company where the bossman can, if he is of the mindset, wave his hand and all his workers obey or get fired.

posted May 03, 2013 12:55 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Randall:
So, what you are saying is that you would prefer to go ahead and just kill them all (with drones) instead of imprisoning them? I see how accepting you are of atrocities when Obama commits them.

---

posted May 03, 2013 01:28 PM            

quote:

---

Yeah, people do seem to have changed their minds around here. Whatever Obama does is golden. Even killing children with drones. Nice to see you liberals finally getting with the program.

---

I didn't change my mind.

quote:

---

Excuse me for pointing out that putting out that possibility is nowhere near calling the drone situation "GOLDEN". It does however save american lives and from the nationalist standpoint that is better than killing our troops along with those innocent targets.

---

Not to mention the cost savings.

Randall, do you suddenly feel something regarding the slaughter of innocents after several years of ground warfare? Are you suggesting that Obama should have just halted all action? Was that even possible or feasible? I think you're looking to try to put Democrats on their heels (hockey jargon), but the reality is that Democrats would still rather not have war by and large. Personally, I view Obama's actions as consistent with the political realities of Washington (not only so, but I think his actions seek to appease Republican constituencies as well). I don't believe for a moment that if it were practical and possible, that Obama would have any qualms with ending military action.

quote:

---

I still disagree with jwhop snd everyone who say that keeping gitmo open is right and proper and that terrorists deserve inhumane treatment.

---

Me too.

quote:

---

I have yet to see anyone here applaud killing innocents with drones, in fact mostof us deplore it by any method. The war on terror has been used to excuse completely inexcusable destruction of millions of people now, and will never end terrorism.

---

I haven't seen that either.

quote:

---

So, what you are saying is that you would prefer to go ahead and just kill them all (with drones) instead of imprisoning them? I see how accepting you are of atrocities when Obama commits them.

---

posted May 03, 2013 01:45 PM              

YOU are one of the people who, with jwhop, felt that iraq and gitmo were justified, not me. I haven't chllangef my position at all but YOU seem suddenly to think that because it is done with drones by obama that killing innocents is somehow worse than making 18 year olds do it and die or be injured in the process?