Obama and Terrorist Rights

[Freak Out]

Close Gitmo. Yeah, great idea.


Two ex-Guantanamo inmates appear in Al-Qaeda video - http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...R90lC_pXaHeW4Q

What you meant to say was don't turn them over to Saudi the country who supports them in the first place. They were probably run through one of the countries rehab centers and released.

[bobblehead]

Obama is dead right to close Gitmo...just like Mac wanted as well.

Yes...McCain. This is probably the first time you have cited him as the authority on anything.

My only question is this. What do you want to do with a bunch of guys on a jihad to destroy america once we close Gitmo??

This is so ludicrous that the result of the lefts outcry in the beginning was that we simply started killing them on the battlefield instead of letting them surrender.

"I surrender" BANG!!! "We have no where to put you if you do that"

[Tyrone Bigguns]

Obama is dead right to close Gitmo...just like Mac wanted as well.

Yes...McCain. This is probably the first time you have cited him as the authority on anything.

My only question is this. What do you want to do with a bunch of guys on a jihad to destroy america once we close Gitmo??

This is so ludicrous that the result of the lefts outcry in the beginning was that we simply started killing them on the battlefield instead of letting them surrender.

"I surrender" BANG!!! "We have no where to put you if you do that"

The point of mentioning Mac wasn't him as an authority..simply that closing Gitmo isn't a dem/liberal thing. You can be a repub or conser and be for it.

What to do? Well, who said we are going to release them.

The real issue for me is that we are holding people (some definitely bad) who have no rights and haven't even been proven to have done anything. When military lawyers are arguing that they can't do their job, not allowed to do their job, etc..then something is wrong.

Perhaps you need to read about Charles Swift and neal katyal. They won their case about the military-tribunal system in the supreme court, yet the repub congress overrode it.

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska?

[texaspackerbacker]

True, you can be Republican/conservative--well, Republican, anyway, and be for closing Guantanamo, just as you can in a few rare cases, be Democrat/liberal--on other issues, anyway, and still be pro-American and common sensical to NOT want it closed--along with all the other CIA secret prisons, along with NOT wanting to end harsh interrogation and NOT wanting to provide these terrorist enemies with OUR rights and procedures of due process.

What to do with them? Bobblehead, I'm really getting psyched up to the idea of simply putting them in the general population of our maximum security prisons. I'm not kidding about trusting the prisoners to be pro-American enough to do the right thing.

Even if putting bounties on the terrorist scum is considered too over-the-top, the word should be put out that anybody offing a terrorist would get a jury trial in the state of their choice.

[Harlan Huckleby]

The real issue for me is that we are holding people (some definitely bad) who have no rights and haven't even been proven to have done anything. When military lawyers are arguing that they can't do their job, not allowed to do their job, etc..then something is wrong.

What rights do POWs have?

I'd really like to know SPECIFICALLY what needs to be done legally or physically for these prisoners. And then I'd like to know why it is necessary to close Guantanamo to make these changes.

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture.

That may have been part of the original intention. Is torture continuing there today?

Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska?

It is a bad idea have POW's mixed-in with the regular prison system.

The alternative would be to setup GITMO-like facilities in the U.S. I really don't understand the problem with housing them at the Cuban base.
And I don't understand why it would be legally easier to torture in a base in Cuba rather than a base in Alabama. Do you?

[SkinBasket]

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture.

That may have been part of the original intention. Is torture continuing there today?

I think it's much more about the ramifications in their entirety of what bringing them onto American soil means - not just the torture aspect.

[Harlan Huckleby]

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture.

That may have been part of the original intention. Is torture continuing there today?

I think it's much more about the ramifications in their entirety of what bringing them onto American soil means - not just the torture aspect.

ya, I've heard references to that, I wonder what it means specifically.

And why would we WANT to give them more legal rights? Seems like wharehousing them in Cuba is perfectly reasonable. Are there standards of evidence for holding a POW if they are brought on U.S. soil? That seems crazy.

[SkinBasket]

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture.

That may have been part of the original intention. Is torture continuing there today?

I think it's much more about the ramifications in their entirety of what bringing them onto American soil means - not just the torture aspect.

ya, I've heard references to that, I wonder what it means specifically.

And why would we WANT to give them more legal rights? Seems like wharehousing them in Cuba is perfectly reasonable. Are there standards of evidence for holding a POW if they are brought on U.S. soil? That seems crazy.

From what I understand, the problem is that there really is no legal way to deal with them once you give them those rights. We would have to let them go based on how they were detained and how whatever evidence the government has was collected. Of course, "letting them go" is problematic since even the most liberal fool realizes you can't just drop them off on a street corner in Jersey and for the most part their countries of origin refuse to let them back into their country - and those who would take them back will simply let them go anyway to continue their jihad.

[texaspackerbacker]

If this is a REALITY-BASED discussion, then the terrorists would have no rights whatsoever in American, just as they have no rights whatsoever at Guantanamo or other overseas locations.

If, however, this is a politically based discussion, then there is no doubt that the scum would be provided with rights and procedures of due process in this country. Why? Because the president and the majority party in Congress wants it that way. Why in the hell they want it that way--when it is so blatantly BAD for this country and all Americans, and when it is so clearly unnecessary in a Constitutional sense, is beyond me. Perhaps some of you forum leftists--who are so like-minded with our seemingly anti-American president and Congressional majority--can shed some light on why they want that.

Locking them away at Guantanamo and elsewhere simply keeps them out of the headlines--to as limited an extent as the leftist mainstream media can be overcome--and allows the American forces trying to defeat our enemies to do their jobs.

[Harlan Huckleby]

In World War II we had German prisoners working on farms in the United States. I hardly think they were given trials.

Maybe our laws have changed. Or maybe those fellas are not legally POW's because we have not declared war on another nation.

It's a messed up situation. There are two sides to the story. I imagine that there were a number of people swept-up and sent to Gitmo who didn't deserve to be there. Perhaps there was a problem determining the (relative) innocents. But since the number of prisoners has been reduced drastically, I assume that has occurred by now.

[texaspackerbacker]

There is a recognized international standard for being considered a prisoner of war. These terrorists don't meet that standard; The WW2 captured Germans did. The modern equivalent to them were Saddam's troops captured in the Gulf War.

Are you really so naive as to fail to see the anti-civilian aspect of the 9/11 terrorists and others of their kind? Similar Germans were tried at Nuremburg.

[mraynrand]

It seems there are three important issues

1.) Separating goat herders from terrorists/un-uniformed fighters. We don't want to off the goat herders - but Harlan makes the point that probably goat herders have already been released. I doubt there are many mistaken identities

2.) Due process. Well, we've been through this. The scum we picked up don't have Geneva convention rights, but that doesn't mean we can't deal with them in an equitable manner. Military tribunals seem reasonable. Putting them in America or in the American legal system seems absolutely absurd (many couldn't be effectively tried due to secret info, others don't qualify for even POW rights. Giving them ideologically motivated lawyers also provides a means to use insanity pleas, etc.). Releasing them into the U.S. population or even overseas seems to be a disaster too. Perhaps those who are released (to Saudi Jihadi twelve step programs) could be fitted with GPS tracking devices, surgically implanted, so we can keep tabs.

3.) Torture. It's been said that the reason they are at Gitmo in the first place is so that they can be tortured out of the public eye. Well, if that was the reason, it didn't work all that well now did it? Gitmo has been under a microscope, deliberately made that why by ----, for PR and political purposes. But why would anyone assume that U.S. prisons would be any better - unless the prisoners were now given the same treatment as serial killers or other U.S. criminals - and then you are back to #2. It's clear that the stated U.S. policy should be that we do not use torture (whatever that means) - and then we use those techniques when it is absolutely necessary without admitting it. Torture should be safe, illegal, and rare.

[Freak Out]

When Gitmo Was (Relatively) Good

By Karen J. Greenberg
Sunday, January 25, 2009; B01

In his first week in office, President Obama signed an executive order that would shut down the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. But as the United States moves to end this shameful episode, it's worth reflecting on the untold story of the very beginnings of Guantanamo.

The following account, which draws on dozens of interviews I conducted over the past few years, tells the startling tale of a period shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, when military officers on the ground tried to do the right thing with the recently captured detainees but were ultimately defeated by civilian officials back in Washington. Those early days -- back before Gitmo became Gitmo -- strongly suggest that the damage the prison inflicted on America's honor and security could have been avoided if policymakers had been willing to follow the uniformed military's basic instincts. It may be too late for these revelations to help redeem Guantanamo in its waning days. But those crafting U.S. detention policy in the years ahead could still benefit from learning about these small initial efforts at decency.

The story begins in the first week of January 2002, when Joint Task Force 160, led by Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert, dutifully landed at Guantanamo Bay. Lehnert's approximately 2,000 troops were fired up about their mission: building the first detention facility for prisoners taken from the Afghan battlefield. The unit had a 96-hour deadline, according to Lehnert, and they were told that about 300 detainees were already en route to Cuba. As Col. William Meier, Lehnert's chief of staff, explained it, the task force had to scavenge materials from existing structures on the base to help build hundreds of cells and the massive tent city needed to house the U.S. troops coming in to guard them. One commander working on the construction mission, Lou V. Corielo, told a Marine Corps interviewer at the time that he found himself lamenting the absence of a Home Depot.

But it wasn't the logistics that most worried Lehnert. It was the policy vacuum into which he and his troops had been thrown. "We are writing the book as we go," one officer said at the time. Lehnert said he had been told by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Geneva Conventions would not technically apply to his mission: He was to act in a manner "consistent with" the conventions (as the mantra went) but not to feel bound by them. The Joint Task Force, advised by U.S. Southern Command, was essentially left on its own to improvise a regime of care and custody for the allegedly hardened al-Qaeda terrorists -- whom the Bush administration famously called "the worst of the worst" -- who would be coming their way. The idea, as Lehnert told me he understood it, was to detain them and wait for a legal process to begin.

In the absence of new policy guidance about how to treat the detainees, Lehnert told me that he felt he had no choice but to rely on the regulations already in place, ones in which the military was well schooled: the Uniform Code of Military Justice, other U.S. laws and, above all, the Geneva Conventions. The detainees, no matter what their official status, were essentially to be considered enemy prisoners of war, a status that mandated basic standards of humane treatment. One lawyer for the Judge Advocate General Corps, Lt. Col. Tim Miller, told me that he used the enemy-POW guidelines as his "working manual." A corrections specialist, Staff Sgt. Anthony Gallegos, called Washington's orders "shady," which he told me gave his colleagues no choice but to "go with the Geneva Conventions."

The task force set to work around the clock, processing the detainees upon arrival, administering medical treatment and providing general care in the cells of the newly built Camp X-Ray. Lehnert's lawyers studied the 143 articles of the Geneva Conventions, paying particular attention to Common Article 3, which prohibits "humiliating and degrading treatment." The head of the operation's detention unit, Col. Terry Carrico, summed up the situation to a team of Marine Corps interviewers several weeks into the mission: "The Geneva Conventions don't officially apply, but they do apply."

But there were early signs of trouble. Lehnert told me that his request to bring representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to Guantanamo -- something international law requires for all prisoners being held in war-related situations -- was, as he heard it, shunted aside somewhere up the chain of command. "The initial request," he recalled, "was turned down." He persisted. Even if he obviously could not implement some of the Geneva Conventions requirements -- the right to musical instruments, for instance, or the right to work for payment -- he wanted advice from ICRC professionals to help him ensure the prisoners' safety and dignity.

Exasperated by repeated attempts to find out which guidelines to apply to the detainees, Col. Manuel Supervielle, the head JAG at Southern Command, picked up the phone and called the ICRC's headquarters in Geneva. As one member of the Southern Command staff remembers the episode, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had warned the Gitmo task force that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office opposed getting involved with the ICRC. But now, according to Supervielle, a U.S. officer was asking the ICRC to help out at Guantanamo. The ICRC answered with an immediate "Yes."

It was a pivotal moment in the history of Guantanamo. Once Supervielle's call had been made, the civilian policymakers around Rumsfeld could not undo what the uniformed military had done -- although, according to Supervielle, an irritated team of lawyers, including Pentagon general counsel William J. "Jim" Haynes II, asked the Southern Command lawyer days later whether there was "a way to back out of it now."

The ICRC arrived at Guantanamo on Jan. 17, 2002 -- six days after the detainees did. Thus began what amounted to a period of subtle defiance of Washington's lack of direction. The ICRC worked with Joint Task Force 160 to create a rational, legal detention operation. ICRC representatives immediately began to help Lehnert's troops improve the grim physical situation of the hastily constructed camp: the open-air cages in which prisoners were held, the cells without toilets, the constant exposure to heat and rain.

To intensify his efforts, Lehnert told me, he requested a Muslim chaplain, Navy Lt. Abuhena M. Saifulislam. "Saif," as the Bangladeshi American imam was known throughout the camp, became a fixture inside the blocs of cages at Camp X-Ray. Task force members recall him strolling daily through the camp, sometimes accompanied by Lehnert, and conversing with the detainees -- some of whom were in no mood to chat, some of whom had stories to tell. Lehnert tried to assure them that some form of legal remedy or transfer home was in the works, as one former detainee, British citizen Shafiq Rasul, told me.

Brig. Gen. Lehnert had built his own Guantanamo, one with ICRC oversight, a Muslim chaplain and an overriding ethos that stressed codified law and the unwritten rules of human decency. Lehnert's team let the detainees talk among themselves; it provided halal food, an additional washing bucket inside cells that lacked toilet facilities, a Koran for each detainee, skullcaps and prayer beads for those who wanted them, and undergarments for the prisoners to wear at shower time, in accordance with Islamic laws that proscribe public nakedness.

Perhaps Lehnert's Guantanamo could have been sustained. But Rumsfeld wanted something else: He expected to get valuable, actionable intelligence from the detainees. By late January 2002, according to Brig. Gen. Galen B. Jackman, Lehnert's chief contact at Southern Command, the defense secretary told officers on a video conference call with Southern Command that he was frustrated by the absence of such information.

A displeased Rumsfeld seems to have decided to create a second command, one that would exist side by side with Lehnert's. It would be devoted solely to gathering intelligence and would be headed by a reservist major general, a former U.S. Army interrogator during the Vietnam War named Michael Dunlavey. Jackman told me that he considered the idea of two parallel commands a "recipe for disaster." At the same time, Navy Capt. Robert Buehn, the commander of the naval base at Guantanamo, recalled, the Gitmo task force's initial expectations of orders to build a courtroom began to fade.

As Dunlavey's command took shape in late February and early March, the fabric of prisoner's rights that Lehnert had woven was beginning to unravel. By the end of February, nearly 200 detainees had mounted a hunger strike to protest their treatment. Interrogations, not trials, had become the future of Guantanamo.

But Lehnert did not concede defeat. In later accounts, several detainees described the surprise they felt watching the general walk through the camp in response to the hunger strike. As these prisoners remembered it, Lehnert would sit on the ground outside the wire-mesh cells, hat in hand, and make promises to prisoners in exchange for their agreement to eat. According to these detainees, he promised to remove a guard who they said had kicked a copy of the Koran and to find a way to reduce the chafing of the ankle shackles they wore during transport. One German detainee, Murat Kurnaz, was among the detainees who watched Lehnert negotiate with the prisoners. "Was he trying to signal that . . . he wanted to speak to the prisoner as a human being?" Kurnaz wondered. Lehnert admitted to me that, with the help of Saif, the chaplain, he even put in a call to a detainee's wife to find out whether she had safely delivered the baby they were expecting -- a boy, it turned out. Above all, the U.S. general hoped to avoid having to feed the prisoners by force.

Thanks in large part to Lehnert's efforts, the hunger strike dwindled to a couple of dozen fasters by the first week of March. But as much as he might have championed the need to respect the detainees as individuals -- albeit allegedly dangerous terrorists -- Guantanamo's future had been decided. As the hunger strike wound down, Lehnert said, he and his unit were given notice that they would soon be leaving.

Once Lehnert's troops departed, a new Guantanamo took shape -- the Guantanamo that an appalled world has come to know over the past seven years. Inmates were kept in isolation, interrogation became the core mission, hunger strikers were regularly force-fed, and above all, the promise of a legal resolution to the detainees' cases has eluded hundreds of prisoners.

As Obama moves to close Guantanamo down, the story of Joint Task Force 160 takes on new significance. Had the United States been willing to trust in the professionalism of its superb military, it could have avoided one of the most shameful passages in its history. Lehnert still regrets the legal limbo that Guantanamo became -- and the damage that did to America's "stature in the world." As he put it, "the juice wasn't worth the squeeze."

And there is a final irony on the horizon.

One of the places now being considered as a new U.S.-based destination for the remaining Gitmo detainees is Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in Southern California. The base's commanding general is none other than Michael Lehnert, now a major general. The detainees might well be returned to his custody. In several senses, we could wind up right back where we started. This time, however, we should have the law on our side -- not to mention a conscience.

kjg550@gmail.com

[mraynrand]

Once Lehnert's troops departed, a new Guantanamo took shape -- the Guantanamo that an appalled world has come to know over the past seven years. Inmates were kept in isolation, interrogation became the core mission, hunger strikers were regularly force-fed, and above all, the promise of a legal resolution to the detainees' cases has eluded hundreds of prisoners.

I didn't see the support for this view in this article. The article focused on the outgoing commanders' view. And, even if somewhat true, it doesn't tell the whole story, and it doesn't sound all that appalling - at least no where near as appalling as snuff videos taken while slaughtering Jewish reporters and others with a machetes, watching as the arterial blood spurts in a fountain several feet above their cleaved necks, with their partially severed head hanging off the side of their torso, eyes still blinking, still aware.

[Harlan Huckleby]

the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. But as the United States moves to end this shameful episode,

"notorious", "shameful" - what is the point of continuing to read the article?

I'm looking for some thoughtful analysis, not a repetition of propoganda.