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Date For Closing Gitmo Gets Pushed Further Back

WildCat

NWO Master Conspirator
WildCat
Joined
Mar 23, 2003
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House panel says "no" to prisoner transfer:
The administration had asked Congress to approve about $350 million to buy and renovate a nearly empty prison in Thomson, Ill. The White House plan was to empty Guantánamo and transfer its detainees to Illinois — including 48 who would be held without trial as wartime prisoners.

But late Wednesday, the House committee unanimously approved a defense bill for 2011 that bans spending money to build or modify any facility inside the United States to house Guantánamo detainees, according to a summary of the bill.
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I'm surprised I hadn't heard of this until today.

No way Gitmo gets closed in Obama's first term.
 
I was reading an article in the NYT about a recent case that is somewhat related to Gitmo, when I read the following quote:
A lawyer for the detainees, Tina Foster, said that if the precedent stood, Mr. Obama and future presidents would have a free hand to “kidnap people from other parts of the world and lock them away for the rest of their lives” without having to prove in court that their suspicions about such prisoners were accurate.

“The thing that is most disappointing for those of us who have been in the fight for this long is all of the people who used to be opposed to the idea of unlimited executive power during the Bush administration but now seem to have embraced it during this administration,” she said. “We have to remember that Obama is not the last president of the United States.”
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Most of the politicans complaining about Gitmo were doing so for transparently partisan reasons, and now that the "right" people are in charge, they just want the subject to go away because they've always understood that the demands that they made were completely unreasonable. That's why there's been no movement on closing Gitmo. The Dems have focused on those things that really matter to them: healthcare, cap and trade, financial regulation, etc. while there is absolutely no enthusiasm for doing anything about Gitmo and the subject isn't even brought up. That's the tell.
 
Complexity said:
Well, he sure as hell doesn't deserve a second term.

He's followed the Bush/Cheney objectives with great care.
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Yes. Because Obama is all powerful and can get his .. wait, the health care debate took how long between members of his own party?

Seriously, all or nothing thinking (or, rather, entirely polarized thinking) is not being seriously critical about why things happen.
 
Damn.. and you know.. no liberals are criticizing him about this either......Except for MSNBC.
 
Rika said:
.. you do know Obama wants it, but most of his party doesn't right? Oh, wait, easier to blame Obama and be bitter.

Nuance. It's easier than being black and white.
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YOu do know that Obama has said that he wants it, right? And you also know that just about everything he says requires at least one grain of salt, right? And that all of his promises come with expiration dates?

Just because he says he wants it doesn't mean squat. I actually would prefer he didn't close down Gitmo, and I actually support his recent fight to deny habeus corpus rights to detainees that were captured on the battlefield and held in Bagram (would be the very first time ever that we gave habeus corpus rights in this situation).

That doesn't prevent me from chuckling over Dems feeling uncomortable having to deal with their broken promises being pointed out, especially when their own previous rhetoric is used against them.
 
Mike, Rika just told you that Obama wants it. Within that same sentence, she also said most of his own party does not. Would you prefer he skirt the governmental process to get what he wants done? Do you really believe that Obama would do what Bush did, and get things done regardless of governmental process?

Does it bother you that Democrats will actually criticize their own President when he screws up? Did you expect us to be like Republicans and support every position the President does?
 
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thaiboxerken said:
Mike, Rika just told you that Obama wants it. Within that same sentence, she also said most of his own party does not. Would you prefer he skirt the governmental process to get what he wants done? Do you really believe that Obama would do what Bush did, and get things done regardless of governmental process?

Does it bother you that Democrats will actually criticize their own President when he screws up? Did you expect us to be like Republicans and support every position the President does?
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I remember that spirit well, from Election 2008: "Sure Obama promises a lot of things that his party will never let him get away with, but the promises sure are pretty! Vote Obama!"

ETA: Oh, wait--that wasn't the spirit at all, was it? Obama promised to be different from Bush. Promised to be a uniter, not a divider. Promised to be post-partisan, post-racial. Promised smart diplomacy. And people believed him, and voted for him.

Now, when it turns out that he's none of those things--the only realistic outcome, really--everybody starts talking about how there's no shame in being the same as every other politician, and pretending like they knew all along it would turn out this way.

Admit it: None of you who voted for him because he campaigned on closing Gitmo expected it to take this long, or ever planned on making excuses for him if it did.
 
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I actually didnt' care much about Gitmo when I voted but I do love how you can read minds. You should go apply for the MDC.

(I admittedly didn't expect his party to do what it did but I'm not exactly surprised at it, no. Leading democrats is herding cats, leading republicans is herding sheep.)
 
MikeMangum said:
Most of the politicans complaining about Gitmo were doing so for transparently partisan reasons, and now that the "right" people are in charge, they just want the subject to go away because they've always understood that the demands that they made were completely unreasonable. That's why there's been no movement on closing Gitmo.
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The demands are entirely reasonable. The problem is that they are politicaly suicidal.

At this point it has been established that there is no legal advantage to holding people at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. There is also a slight lack of a practical advantage as it should be posible to run a secure facility at a lower cost on the US mainland.

Thus it ends up purely as a political issue.
 
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