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Title: Remember How Obama Promised to Close Guantanamo Bay?
Source:
aolnews.com
URL Source: http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/a ... -close-guantanamo-bay/19647494
Published: Sep 24, 2010
Author: Paul Wachter
Post Date: 2010-10-17 15:38:04 by WhiteSands
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Keywords: Guantanamo Bay, democrats
Views: 272
Comments: 2
In a long review of three publications on the subject for The New York Review of Books, David Cole ponders this continually vexing question. Allegedly conceived, Cole writes, as a "hole into which suspects would for all practical purposes disappear, never to be heard from again," the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay was set up in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks by the Bush administration. It incurred widespread domestic and international outrage since it first began accepting prisoners in October 2001. And yet it has survived virtually unchanged well into the supposedly more internationally conscientious Obama presidency, despite the fact that the president said he'd shut it down within a year of taking office in January 2009. Almost two years later, it remains open for business. To be fair, Obama's attempts to relocate the detainees to continental American soil have been repeatedly foiled by Congress. But no matter who's to blame, it appears the detention center will remain at least to the end of the presidential term. This is the current state of affairs, as described by Cole: One hundred seventy-six men remain imprisoned there, without trial and in most cases without criminal charges. Many if not most have been the victims of torture and cruel and degrading treatment at U.S. hands. Some six hundred have been released, many because there was not sufficient evidence to justify their detention in the first place. Yet not a single inmate has received an apology, or an accounting, or justice for his brutal mistreatment. So what should be done? Cole, like others before him, advocates trying at least some detainees in civilian courts. Though some have allegedly been tortured, and that part of the testimony would be struck down, there's probably sufficient other evidence to bring about the indictments of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and several others. Others, he says, would and should simply be released due to lack of evidence. Sponsored Links But there's a third category -- those who cannot be successfully tried but may be legally detained as prisoners of war, "Thus, even if all the abuse that has poisoned Guantanamo were acknowledged and rectified, some men would remain appropriately detained without trial -- as prisoners of war in the ongoing armed conflict with al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan," he writes. To move forward on Guantanamo, Cole suggests, pace Obama, that it would be helpful (and moral too) to look back and investigate -- not necessarily with the threat of prosecution -- those who were responsible for torturing the detainees. "As long as we fail to look back, Guantanamo's future -- and the future of our policies regarding 'enemy combatants' held there and at other detention sites around the world -- will continue to be tainted, encased in soundproof glass, a secret hidden from no one but ourselves," Cole writes.
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#1. To: WhiteSands (#0)
"I really wanna care. I wanna feel somethin'. Let me dig a little deeper:. No, My give-a-damn's busted"~ Messina Jo Dee
You need to take the menopause meds and clam down. Despite whet you feel, you don't own the forum.
-----------------------------------------------------------
#2. To: Murron (#1)
Liberals:
-Pro nuclear proliferation.
-Support fundamentalist religion that execute gays.
-Have no issues with inmate abuse.
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