Candidate Obama attacked the shameful policy of the Bush administration to hold prisoners at Guatanamo in Cuba with no charges, no lawyers, no due process, no habeas corpus. President Obama's first act on his first day in office was to close down Guatanamo.
Now, though, the Obama administration is planning to hold prisoners in the even more remote Bagram air base in Afghanistan under the same shameful "black hole" rules.
I strongly supported President Obama and still do. Nearly everything that the new administration has done have been a step forward for the nation, and a relief to me personally. Because I support Obama, I think it is my duty to criticize wrong things that my guy does.
The no-rules prison at Bagram is very wrong.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
There are rules at Gitmo and Bagram. You may not agree with them and you probably don't even know what they are. Obama, like Bill Clinton,is a master of taking both sides of each isssue. Get used to it. It is a technique that will work for a while as it did for Clinton.In the end it will hurt him and the country as the world will begin to see him as a liar if he continues to talk out of both sides of his mouth.
Where would you have us hold these prisoners? We no longer have lawyers and judges like Oliver Wendell Holmes who had seen the face of war and recognized that there are some folks who just are not good candidates for the civil justice system. They are not criminals. Our civil justice system is not designed to deal with them. They are the enemy who want us dead and who would, if given a lawyer and a day in court, plan to kill the defense counsel and blow up the courthouse.
The sooner those of our citizens who have been protected from the world by the soldiers they so despise get it through their heads that these guys are not like us, never will be, and will only respond to measures that protect us even if unpleasant for the bad guys, the better off we as a nation will be.
As someone who neither supported Mr. Obama in his electoral campaign nor has agreed with a single domestic policy he has thus far promulgated, I cannot say that I’m unhappy with his various foreign policy demarches. Like Mr. Gruntled, I have been pleased that the Administration wants to end our little experiment in Gulag-building. Unlike Mr. Gruntled, I’m not overly concerned with the reputation of the US overseas, and, if there are dangerous terrorists in various black prisons around the world, I wouldn’t be averse to eliminating them with extreme prejudice (to use an older formulation).
I do, however, wish that Mr. Obama would abandon the silly notion that the US should be the world's chief police officer. 'They' (Islamic terrorists) don't hate us because of our 'freedom'. They hate us because we stick our collective noses in everyone else's business, and we are seen by the Islamic world as lackeys for the agenda of hard-line Likudniks in Israel. I might have missed something, but 'they' haven't attacked Switzerland, have they?
This is just the shape of things to come...
Really! You didn't think his pro abortion decision was rally bad? I guess aborting human life is not as bad as making Islamic terrorist feel uncomfortable and scared. Interesting moral standard Beau.
I was just going to make the same comment as Anon 9:25 AM. Obama supports the killing of babies who are "born alive" after an attempted abortion and that's ok with you, but you are troubled that he will hold enemy combatants at Bagram????
Please help me understand your logic and moral reasoning here.
State Senator Obama did not support "killing babies who are 'born alive'." That is a canard that has been effectively answered several times. Illinois already had a law requiring doctors to save partially delivered babies if possible. That is why Obama said that part of the law wasn't necessary.
Obama is pro-choice on abortion. If you are pro-life, you will never agree with him on that. However, President Obama has not made a decision on abortion yet, one way or the other, which is what this post was about. And given the reluctance of Republicans or Democrats in Congress to do anything about abortion, it is not likely that any abortion decision will be made in Washington any time soon.
I grant you that Obama said he would have supported federal legislation to protect born alive infants. However, he was willing to allow born-alive infants to die because he would not support state legislation that did not, in his opinion, contain adequate protections for Roe v. Wade.
In Obama's world, it's ok for infants to die in order to protect the right to abortion.
And he has problems with Gitmo? I have trouble understanding this man's moral compass.
Post a Comment