Barack Obama a few weeks ago said the following:
"There are no neat or easy answers here," Mr. Obama said in a speech in which he pledged to "clean up the mess at Guantanamo."
The president also said opening and continuing the military prison "set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world."
"I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo," Mr. Obama said. "As president, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. Our security interests won't permit it. Our courts won't allow it. And neither should our conscience."
Now according to the Washington Post the President is going to ask his lawyers to draft an executive order to keep them locked up indefinitely. What the hell...
Why are we doing this. Give them a trial or let them go. If they are terrorists, we should have to prove it. If they are guilty of a crime and deserve prison, then charge them and try them. We are the UNITED FUCKING STATES OF AMERICA, we are better then running secret prisons, and keeping people in prisons for as long as we want without charging them. That's George the Third pre-Revolutionary War shit, and we fought for the freedom to get away from such tyranny.
Candidate and Senator Obama said this:
In the five years that the President's system of military tribunals has existed, not one terrorist has been tried. Not one has been convicted. And in the end, the Supreme Court of the United found the whole thing unconstitutional, which is why we're here today.
We could have fixed all of this in a way that allows us to detain and interrogate and try suspected terrorists while still protecting the accidentally accused from spending their lives locked away in Guantanamo Bay. Easily. This was not an either-or question.
* Instead of allowing this President - or any President - to decide what does and does not constitute torture, we could have left the definition up to our own laws and to the Geneva Conventions, as we would have if we passed the bill that the Armed Services committee originally offered.
* Instead of detainees arriving at Guantanamo and facing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal that allows them no real chance to prove their innocence with evidence or a lawyer, we could have developed a real military system of justice that would sort out the suspected terrorists from the accidentally accused.
* And instead of not just suspending, but eliminating, the right of habeas corpus - the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention, we could have given the accused one chance - one single chance - to ask the government why they are being held and what they are being charged with.
and now this is what we get.
Why do we have to keep compromising on this shit. Lead OBAMA. LEAD. Don't follow, take a path, and get people to follow you down it. I'm not impressed.