Nydia Ywalmoriel
01-22-2010, 02:58 PM
The task force assigned to make recommendations on the fate of the remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay reported out today and concluded that:
Forty-seven of the prisoners currently housed there should be held indefinitely without trial.
Story broken on the BBC here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8476075.stm
How can we hold someone *indefinitely* without trial as a 'final' disposition? If we're going to go that far, hell, why not just execute them?? It'd certainly be more humane...
Do you mean to tell me that after as much as eight years we couldn't *manufacture* enough evidence to take these folks to trial, even by military tribunal, if the crimes they were captured and imprisoned for weren't sufficiently damning?
It doesn't matter is someone is the next Charles Manson, Osama Bin Ladin, or Lex Luthor, everyone we hold in a nation (presumably) governed by the rule of law should see their day in court and have the charges against them evaluated, weighed, and a disposition made, even if that disposition is that they be imprisoned for life or executed. Even in the darkest days of the old Soviet regime, people got their kangaroo court trials before receiving their tenner, and before the NKVD completed its stranglehold on the apparatus of law in the '30s, people were even released if there was insufficent evidence against them.
And before some of you start on the 'But they're not citizens, they're 'enemy combatants' script: Either we have something on these folks or we don't. Suggesting that they 'be held indefinitely without trial' is tantamount to making an open declaration that we are too ashamed to admit that we've hopelessly bungled any legitimate 'cases' we had against these individuals, that bringing these cases to court would require disclosure of yet more, and more severe, torture, and/or that the evidence we have to bring against them is so tenuous that it would be laughed out of even a kangaroo court. Simply making scaremongering statements like 'they're too dangerous to release!' is meaningless and the last stand of those with nothing else to stand on.
And if there's something that *we* have to hide with regard to why some of these individuals' cases have been determined necessary never to see the light of day, well, perhaps there are other folks who need to be on trial...
Sincerely,
Nydia
Forty-seven of the prisoners currently housed there should be held indefinitely without trial.
Story broken on the BBC here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8476075.stm
How can we hold someone *indefinitely* without trial as a 'final' disposition? If we're going to go that far, hell, why not just execute them?? It'd certainly be more humane...
Do you mean to tell me that after as much as eight years we couldn't *manufacture* enough evidence to take these folks to trial, even by military tribunal, if the crimes they were captured and imprisoned for weren't sufficiently damning?
It doesn't matter is someone is the next Charles Manson, Osama Bin Ladin, or Lex Luthor, everyone we hold in a nation (presumably) governed by the rule of law should see their day in court and have the charges against them evaluated, weighed, and a disposition made, even if that disposition is that they be imprisoned for life or executed. Even in the darkest days of the old Soviet regime, people got their kangaroo court trials before receiving their tenner, and before the NKVD completed its stranglehold on the apparatus of law in the '30s, people were even released if there was insufficent evidence against them.
And before some of you start on the 'But they're not citizens, they're 'enemy combatants' script: Either we have something on these folks or we don't. Suggesting that they 'be held indefinitely without trial' is tantamount to making an open declaration that we are too ashamed to admit that we've hopelessly bungled any legitimate 'cases' we had against these individuals, that bringing these cases to court would require disclosure of yet more, and more severe, torture, and/or that the evidence we have to bring against them is so tenuous that it would be laughed out of even a kangaroo court. Simply making scaremongering statements like 'they're too dangerous to release!' is meaningless and the last stand of those with nothing else to stand on.
And if there's something that *we* have to hide with regard to why some of these individuals' cases have been determined necessary never to see the light of day, well, perhaps there are other folks who need to be on trial...
Sincerely,
Nydia