The continued existence of Guantanamo should be the eternal shame of president Obama and the Democratic party except of course that they are incapable of feeling any shame. Reneging on the promise to close it was bad enough, now you can add this to the rapidly growing list of things that Obama and his party gets away with that George W. Bush wouldn’t have.
[Bryan Broyles, the Pentagon’s deputy chief defense counsel at Guantanamo] and other observers believe that some policy changes instituted under the Obama administration would have sparked outrage if President George W. Bush was still in the White House. One change he said should have been “extremely alarming” to the legal community: the rule allowing death penalty defendants to plead guilty and still receive the death penalty.
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Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system.“There is nothing about this system that the average American, if they were caught up in it, would see as being fair,” Kammen said. “The Republicans have an interest in keeping this process going and the Democrats have an interest, to a certain extent, in not embarrassing Obama.”
The fecklessness of the Democratic party is a wonder to behold.
This one can’t be blamed on Obama. The Rethuglicans added language to legislation that prevents the administration from spending money to close Guantanamo. This effectively prevents the administration from closing the facility because they can’t spend money to do so.
A question:
Could the ACLU gather donations to fund the transfer of prisoners out of Guantanamo? I assume that the POTUS would have the authority to order the transfer. Could congress’s “power of the purse” be sidestepped by having private citizens put up the necessary cash?
And exactly what law prevents their trial or release? It’s certainly a political matter. But any POTUS could have emptied the prison via the legal process at any time. They have chosen not to.
With results like these: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52670-2004Oct21.html it is no surprise that there is no rush to release them. I have no solution myself.
Big problem: what does one do with those who were combatants but not from an official military?
POWS: they go home when the war is over. What does one do with an Al Qeada member captured on the battlefield?
This is a horrible, sticky mess that I have no solutions for.
The solution is simple:
Step 1)release everyone held in Guantanamo immediately, repatriating them where possible.
Step 2) Pull U.S. forces out of Pakistan and Afghanistan, leaving those who are actually combatants with no one to fight.
Step 1 could have been a trial at some point in the past, but by now it’s completely impossible to actually legally try anyone who’s there due to rights violations, lack of evidence not derived from coercion. Any halfway honest or law-abiding American judge would have no choice but to immediately toss their cases out.