Releasing GITMO detainees on to US soil and providing 'assistance'

[Jayhawkk]

President Barack Obama's intelligence chief confirmed Thursday that some Guantanamo inmates may be released on US soil and receive assistance to return to society.

"If we are to release them in the United States, we need some sort of assistance for them to start a new life," said National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair at his first press conference.

"You can't just put them on the street," he added. "All that is work in progress."

Terror inmates may be released in US: intel chief

 

[Jayhawkk]

This is... lovely.

 

[Wilderbeast]

There's a great use of American taxpayer dollars. Ya let me think about it ... I definetly want to pay for terrorist detainees to get a "fresh start." It is policy such as this that shows Obama's true lack of prudence and economic understanding that will lead to bankrupting our nation.

BEAST

 

[Jayhawkk]

It's like letting loose a bunch of child molesters in a room full of kids and providing them with the icecream and cookies... Makes no sense to put these people into a world they hate and then fund their well being in the process.

 

[TexasTitan]

Release them down here. We'll rehab them our own way.

 

[EasyEJL]

why don't we give them a truckload of C4 while we are at it.

 

[lutherblsstt]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, discusses his forthcoming documentary film Outside the Law, the developing story of Binyam Mohamed, the innocence of the vast majority of those held at Guantanamo over the years, the still-standing court ruling which upheld the “enemy combatant” power of the president and the continuing lack of process for those held in various U.S. dungeons in Afghanistan.

http://awr.dissentradio.com/09_03_09_worthington.mp3

Andy Worthington is a London-based historian and the author of The Guantanamo Files.

 

[Jayhawkk]

Unless they are legally here in the US prior to their detainment they should not have a right to a life here supported by our tax dollars. Send them back home.

If people can assume that detainment and imprisonment isn't enough to warrant them actually being guilty then I follow the same logic on their freedom and dismissal of charges. If they're US citizens then fine but if not then kick their asses back to their homeland and let them deal with them.

 

[dsade]

Wait...wasn't this EXACT issue brought up before the freakin election, and he swore he would NOT do this?

 

[EasyEJL]

Wait...wasn't this EXACT issue brought up before the freakin election, and he swore he would NOT do this?

Wait, Obama is lying? gasp.

 

[Irish Cannon]

Wait, Obama is lying? gasp.

LOL

I mean, someone is inevitably going to say, "All presidents have lied." - Let me first ask...to what degree compared to this? This is awful.

 

[Jayhawkk]

To what degree? You can only answer that by knowing all of the lies to compare and i highly doubt we have that information. However, I don't think Obama is the King of Lies just yet. His administration and his current progress, and i use that term loosely, is enough to piss me off on a daily basis.

 

[Irish Cannon]

To what degree? You can only answer that by knowing all of the lies to compare and i highly doubt we have that information. However, I don't think Obama is the King of Lies just yet. His administration and his current progress, and i use that term loosely, is enough to piss me off on a daily basis.

I don't know...King of Lies in terms of how many, or how severe? Continuing at this pace, he will be get there in both facets.

 

[Irish Cannon]

Have you heard that congress now has the ability to ban books published during campaigns that show advocacy or bias towards a candidate? Any negative or positive comment is enough to get it banned.

 

[Jayhawkk]

No, have a link to that?

 

[dsade]

Have you heard that congress now has the ability to ban books published during campaigns that show advocacy or bias towards a candidate? Any negative or positive comment is enough to get it banned.

I think you might be leaving out some details...that would be unconstitutional (not that that ever stopped presidents like Lincoln from doing similar to newspaper men).

 

[EasyEJL]

Fairness doctrine related perhaps?

 

[nopeace]

Andy Worthington, author of The Guantanamo Files, discusses his forthcoming documentary film Outside the Law, the developing story of Binyam Mohamed, the innocence of the vast majority of those held at Guantanamo over the years, the still-standing court ruling which upheld the “enemy combatant” power of the president and the continuing lack of process for those held in various U.S. dungeons in Afghanistan.

http://awr.dissentradio.com/09_03_09_worthington.mp3

Andy Worthington is a London-based historian and the author of The Guantanamo Files.

You beat me to the punch. Much of the detainee's had no charges against them. Most were tortured into confessing for something they didn't do.

 

[dsade]

You beat me to the punch. Much of the detainee's had no charges against them. Most were tortured into confessing for something they didn't do.

Apologize, give them some money, and send them back to their respective countries.

 

[EasyEJL]

You beat me to the punch. Much of the detainee's had no charges against them. Most were tortured into confessing for something they didn't do.

sure sure, i'm sure his video is just as objective as your an luthers posts :thinkerg:

 

[Irish Cannon]

Apologize, give them some money, and send them back to their respective countries.

Isn't that exactly what they did to that guy from Yemen?...now he's second in command of some huge Al-Qaeda sect.

 

[dsade]

Isn't that exactly what they did to that guy from Yemen?...now he's second in command of some huge Al-Qaeda sect.

Then hunt his ass BACK down and assassinate him.

The danger of bringing extremely bitter foreigners, quite possibly with revenge in their hearts, here and then financing them to remain here is VERY disturbing and the potential damage is orders of magnitude higher here than back in his own country, depending on the intelligence of the individual and the extreme suggestability of the populace here (which is pretty high, IMO).

 

[Irish Cannon]

Oh, I'm definitely not defending the other method.

...we should just make a reality TV show out of all of them. At least we'll keep an eye on them.

 

[dsade]

Oh, I'm definitely not defending the other method.

...we should just make a reality TV show out of all of them. At least we'll keep an eye on them.

and for you we have....The Running Man HOME GAME!!!

 

[lutherblsstt]

Unless they are legally here in the US prior to their detainment they should not have a right to a life here supported by our tax dollars. Send them back home.

Agreed

If people can assume that detainment and imprisonment isn't enough to warrant them actually being guilty then I follow the same logic on their freedom and dismissal of charges. If they're US citizens then fine but if not then kick their asses back to their homeland and let them deal with them.

Who is assuming that? Have you read anything about the people at Guantanamo?

From Andy Worthington:

"Some of us have known for years that the US administration’s basis for holding prisoners without charge or trial in the “War on Terror” has more to do with a fantasy world in which nonsense masquerades as truth, logic is skewed, and nothing that is uttered remotely resembles evidence that would stand up in a court of law.

At the heart of this fantasy world are the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs). Introduced in summer 2004, in a deliberate snub to the Supreme Court, which had just ruled that, contrary to the administration’s assertions, Guantánamo was run by the US and not by Cuba, and that the prisoners had the right to know why they were being held (under the “Great Writ” of habeas corpus, inherited from the British, and designed to prevent executive tyranny), the CSRTs were pale mockeries of the Geneva Conventions’ Article 5 battlefield tribunals, which were intended to separate soldiers from civilians swept up by accident in the heat of battle.

Far from the time and place of capture, the prisoners’ requests for outside witnesses were all refused (on the basis that the most powerful government in the world was unable to track them down, even if they were serving in the US-backed Afghan government). In addition, the prisoners were refused the right to legal representation, and were prey to secret evidence, which was not disclosed to them, and which was frequently nothing more than hearsay, spurious allegations furnished by bounty hunters selling innocent men or foot soldiers to the US military as “terrorists,” or blatantly false confessions obtained from other prisoners through the use of torture, coercion or bribery.

The disgraceful failings of the CSRTs have been analyzed in depth, in particular in a February 2006 report by the Seton Hall Law School (based on a series of “Unclassified Summaries of Evidence” released by the Pentagon in 2005), in my book The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (based on a detailed analysis of 8,000 pages of documents released by the Pentagon in 2006), and in a statement made last June by Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on the CSRTs, and who concluded that the gathering of materials for use in the tribunals was severely flawed, consisting of intelligence “of a generalized nature -- often outdated, often ‘generic,’ rarely specifically relating to the individual subjects of the CSRTs or to the circumstances related to those individuals’ status,” that “what purported to be specific statements of fact lacked even the most fundamental earmarks of objectively credible evidence,” and that the whole system was geared towards rubber-stamping the detainees’ prior designation as “enemy combatants.”

Until now, however, the tribunals’ failings had never been deconstructed by a US court, and certainly not with the acute savagery reserved for last week’s ruling in the case of Parhat v. Gates.

As one of dozens of cases that had been stuck in a legal roadblock after the executive persuaded Congress to change the law to remove the prisoners’ habeas rights (a decision which was only finally reversed three weeks ago, when the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutional habeas corpus rights), the bare bones of the Parhat verdict, reported last week, were explosive enough.

In a one-page ruling, the judges in the District Court in Washington -- noticeably, two Republicans and a Democrat -- “held invalid a decision of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal” that Hufaiza Parhat -- one of 18 Uighurs (Muslims from an oppressed outpost of China), who are not even alleged to have raised arms against the US -- was an enemy combatant,” and “directed the government to release or transfer” him (or to hold a new tribunal “consistent with the Court’s opinion”).

In another line of attack, the judges noted that Parhat's lawyers had argued that the Chinese government -- the Uighurs’ only enemy, according to their many accounts at Guantánamo -- was the source of some of the classified information used against him during his tribunal, which prompted Judge Merrick B. Garland to conclude, “Parhat has made a credible argument that -- at least for some of the assertions -- the common source is the Chinese government, which may be less than objective with respect to the Uighurs.”

In the most stunning passage, however -- and the one that brings Lewis Carroll and the fantasies of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass into sharp focus -- Judge Garland quoted from Carroll’s poem The Hunting of the Snark as another method of discrediting the government's argument that its evidence was reliable because it was mentioned in three different classified documents.

In one sentence, which, either by happy coincidence or deliberate design, shines an unwavering light on the post-9/11 fantasy world in which evidence can be conjured up out of nowhere, Judge Garland, who was joined in the unanimous opinion by Chief Judge David B. Sentelle and Judge Thomas B. Griffith, wrote, “Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.”

Do you remember the trial at the end of Alice in Wonderland?

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first -- verdict afterwards.”
“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won't!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.

“Who cares for you?” said Alice … “You're nothing but a pack of cards!”