Innocents in Gitmo

[Cookie Parker]

Anyone detained or arrested should have his or her day in court with competent legal representation. Serial Killers do... Baby Rapists do...

The fact that there is such a fear of having a fair trial only highlights the fact that these are obviously not all documented cases... meaning they are holding people in prison forever on a "hunch"?

Have fair trails and then punish those found guilty to the MAX! It seems so obvious... but then this is the administration that set up one repeated lie after another to get the country to go along with an invasion into Iraq. Doesn't really surprise me.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qGAqA-muYU

Not only on a hunch, but on a $5,000 bounty they gave Pakistani people to turn in others for torture....not even involved in the whole thingy.

 

[Libsmasher]

Anyone detained or arrested should have his or her day in court with competent legal representation. Serial Killers do... Baby Rapists do...

The fact that there is such a fear of having a fair trial only highlights the fact that these are obviously not all documented cases... meaning they are holding people in prison forever on a "hunch"?

Have fair trails and then punish those found guilty to the MAX! It seems so obvious... but then this is the administration that set up one repeated lie after another to get the country to go along with an invasion into Iraq. Doesn't really surprise me.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qGAqA-muYU

Garsh, the US held 100,000 axis POWS in the US in WWII, and none of them had "their day in court" - for shame.

 

[PLC1]

I agree there is Authoritarian tendancies on both sides but it has always been that way, since the nation began, and since neither side has won - I think we are doing pretty well maintaining balance.

Except that the government seems to be getting more and more authoritarian, regardless of which party is in power.

neoconservative to isolationist

I would use "Expansionist to Isolationist".

OK, that works better. The term "neoconservative" has been kicked around so much that it has begun to lose some meaning. Expansionist is something we can all understand.

To broaden our continuum in Congress would require more parties... Thats not going to happen. Our ideologies are bottlenecked by similarities in order to form groups and pass legislation.

For instance, we could have 100 people write the same law and we would end up with 100 different versions. We would then have to comb through them all, pick out the reoccurring precepts, and then re-write a condensed version that all 100 can sign onto. Nobody will get everything they want but the majority opinions will have the most weight and the minority opinions will likewise be represented.

Or, we would probably be better off with no parties at all. George Washington said something about political parties being the downfall of the new Republic, I believe.

And, the current parties are far from being on opposite ends of any spectrum. Both are big government parties, tending to spend more than they have and to ignore that inconvenient tenth amendment whenever they can, which is often. The Republican party has gotten so far from its limited government roots as to be a whole new party, one that outspends the Democratic party.

Please comment on something from an earlier post of mine that seemed to go unnoticed:



It may sound un-American to say a trial is a bad thing but in this case, I feel the innocent detainees would be better served by the military proceedings rather than the slow, inefficiencies of our Court system.

Lets say some innocent farmer is picked up for any old reason under the sun and sent to a detention center - The Military checks up on these things and releases people found to have been wrongly incarcerated. That takes some time to do but far less than shipping that detainee to America, holding a series of court hearings (you know court takes multiple sessions), then years and millions of dollars later (the whole time away from their families) the farmer is finally found innocent, flown back home and released to his family that has now had to go without him for years longer than they otherwise would have had to.

While you consider yourself a pragmatist, your support of this decision looks more like an idealogical stance. Once you look at this realistically with all the logistical complications, this decision looks like a nightmare to people who are actually innocent and wrongfully detained.

I'm sure you have your own analogy or example that might explain why this decision is pragmatic, so I look forward to hearing it.

They need a speedy and fair trial, whoever does it. If the military system is more efficient, and will still free the innocents, then let's by all means do it. The prisoners should have had a trial years ago.

Keeping people in prison for years without trial, whether or not they are citizens, is simply un American. If they aren't POW, as the pres has said that they aren't, then we shouldn't treat them like POW either, should we? Those POW who were kept until the end of WWII have nothing at all to do with the current prisoners kept in Gitmo.

And, the treatment of prisoners is a national scandal any way you look at it.

 

[GenSeneca]

PLC1,

First... I would like to thank you for replying.
Second... I appreciate that you gave your opinions about the topic - and not your opinion about my character.
It would be nice if everyone here were so mature.

They need a speedy and fair trial, whoever does it. If the military system is more efficient, and will still free the innocents, then let's by all means do it. The prisoners should have had a trial years ago.

Too late... We're sending them to the snails court upon the SCOTUS decision. Like I said, the innocent will be interned far longer now than they otherwise would have been. Another unintended consequence of doing the right thing....

And, the treatment of prisoners is a national scandal any way you look at it.

We have never disagreed on this. I just felt the Democrats went the wrong direction on dealing with this to prevent further abuses. Since they were able to dub Iraq "Bush's War", any problems they could exacerbate would reflect upon Bush and not the Democrats.

So they scored political points by fighting the president when he asked for their help in clarifying and defining critical issues. They broadened the term of Torture so that the count of "tortured" prisoners could be as high as possible. They did a great job of beating up Bush as wanting to mangle the Geneva Convention when he asked that our enemies be defined in a category and added to the treaty.

We may not agree about the behavior of the Democrats on this issue but I think we can both agree they benefit the most from "scandals" while Bush is in office... even if they helped create the scandal.

 

[PLC1]

PLC1,

First... I would like to thank you for replying.
Second... I appreciate that you gave your opinions about the topic - and not your opinion about my character.
It would be nice if everyone here were so mature.



Too late... We're sending them to the snails court upon the SCOTUS decision. Like I said, the innocent will be interned far longer now than they otherwise would have been. Another unintended consequence of doing the right thing....



We have never disagreed on this. I just felt the Democrats went the wrong direction on dealing with this to prevent further abuses. Since they were able to dub Iraq "Bush's War", any problems they could exacerbate would reflect upon Bush and not the Democrats.

So they scored political points by fighting the president when he asked for their help in clarifying and defining critical issues. They broadened the term of Torture so that the count of "tortured" prisoners could be as high as possible. They did a great job of beating up Bush as wanting to mangle the Geneva Convention when he asked that our enemies be defined in a category and added to the treaty.

We may not agree about the behavior of the Democrats on this issue but I think we can both agree they benefit the most from "scandals" while Bush is in office... even if they helped create the scandal.

I think we do agree on that point. The Democrats like to play political games and score points at the expense of the Republicans, just as the Republicans like to do the same to the Democrats. It's called rotten party politics, and both major parties engage in it.

Of course, the Democrats will benefit most from the Bush scandals, and so want to make the most of them. They aren't getting too far with it, though, since the Democrat controlled Congress currently has public approval ratings even lower than those of the president.

Maybe the public is finally getting tired of political gamesmanship, and want something done to meet the real challenges facing this nation. We can hope that is the case anyway.