Guantanamo Bay

I had a feeling this would happen. In all honest I don’t blame President Obama for it, I blame the weak-kneed Democrats:

Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace the Guantánamo Bay prison.

As a result, officials now believe that they are unlikely to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and transfer its population of terrorism suspects until 2011 at the earliest — a far slower timeline for achieving one of President Obama’s signature national security policies than they had previously hinted.

I’m sure many will blame Obama for this, but in all honesty these obstacles were things we knew about from the get-go. It takes money to shutter the Torture-Inn, and that money has to come from Congress.

I really didn’t realize that the first thing you have to learn when becoming a terrorist was how to be an escape artist:

“This move will put our citizens in unnecessary danger” – John Cornyn

If the facilities used to house the most dangerous people in this country are so insecure then aren’t we already in serious danger? Why hasn’t Cornyn brought up these concerns before? I mean shouldn’t we be concerned that Manson or David Berkowitz will escape sometime soon?

On the other hand, if people like Cornyn are so damn terrified of the decision to move the Gitmo detainees to Illinois, then I wouldn’t trust him to protect the toilet from a flushing before I can grab my camera for a ratemypoo.com picture, let alone this nation.

Andrew Breitbart has obtained a leaked memo stating that the detainees at Guantanamo will be moved to Illinois. Senator Dick Durbin and Governor Pat Quinn are applauding the move, but government officials are saying that no final decision has been made yet and the memo is only a “draft”.

This brings me to another issue – the leaked memo. We are dealing with a leaked government document that deals with national security. Should the Obama administration take the Bush approach and investigate the leak? Hell why not put Breitbart under oath and force him to reveal how he got it? This practice was championed by people like Breitbart when it was done under Bush’s regime, so he should welcome it again, shouldn’t he?

Oh and to think that just a year ago the right was cheering the good General as their big hero. Now what will they say?

Following the news the other day of a former Gitmo detainee now heading al Qaeda’s Yemen group, now we have a report of two more former detainees showing up in an al Qaeda video:

Two men released from the US "war on terror" prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have appeared in a video posted on a jihadist website, the SITE monitoring service reported.

One of the two former inmates, a Saudi man identified as Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, or prisoner number 372, has been elevated to the senior ranks of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, a US counter-terrorism official told AFP.

And just like the other day, the right is using this as their argument to keep Gitmo open. Will someone please ask these wingnuts why they want to keep the policies intact the play catch and release with these terrorists? This was George W. Bush’s policies that let these people go back into the wild, and the right seems content on having it that way, It would be nice if they could pull their heads out of their asses long enough to realize they are champion for al Qaeda.

Andrew Sullivan raises a great point by asking that very question. The right is in a frenzy over the article I posted earlier about the released Gitmo detainee that was involved in the U.S. embassy attack in Yemen. What they are trying to do is create a strawman here. If our prisons are so at risk for these people to escape, then we have much bigger problems. Terrorists go for these big glamorous attacks. They take a lot of planning and resources to pull off, meaning there is more time to catch them. That is actually a lot better than some serial rapist or mass murder who would escape and just go out and start doing his crimes all over again instantly.

I still believe there is some serious questions regarding the detainee released from Gitmo. First and foremost, it really casts a dark shadow on the intelligence community that Bush was supposed to have overhauled. Why did they let him go if he was really such a bad man? There is also a chance that he wasn’t so bad when caught. Perhaps this guy was actually innocent, but the treatment he received at Gitmo forced him over to the bad side. I would love to see the Obama administration really dig into this to find out, as I wouldn’t be shocked one bit if that did happen. We have been warned that could happen for years.

But there is still something to think about here. This guy didn’t escape Gitmo, like Frank Lee Morris of Alcatraz fame. Instead he was released. That is a key word that seems to be missing from the wingnut argument, like this one from Gateway Pundit:

Again, there are at least 61 former Gitmo detainees who returned to terror.
Barack Obama wants to close Gitmo.

Or this one on Pajamas Media:

Closing Guantanamo and the court decisions granting enemy combatants access to the US legal system will jointly make it impossible for the US to detain prisoners again.

These people are so dunk on the Bush/Cheney era Kool-Aid that they can not comprehend the most serious issue here. Our military, under the command of George W. Bush, let this guy go into the wild. So I need to ask again – was this a failure in our intelligence and military court system, or did our system actually create this guy through the treatment he received? This isn’t an attempt to take a jab at the former administration or Gitmo, but rather it’s a very serious question that should be asked so it doesn’t happen again.

Obama in no way said he was closing Gitmo and letting everyone go. On the contrary, he wants to investigate every legal option we have available to bring them to justice. The report by the New York Times is not bad news for the Obama administration. On the contrary, it is supporting evidence that our system under George Bush was flawed – fatally flawed. Obama wants to overhaul that system, and this report is just the proof he needs that the system does need overhauled.

And I do stand by my former statement that having all these people in the same closed facility is much more dangerous than having them separate and spread throughout the world. People learn to communicate in prison, regardless of any rules or separation. That means again reaffirms my earlier notion that this detainee could have actually been innocent, but became a “product of the system”. In other words – we created this terrorist by the very actions President Obama wants to get rid of and the right wants to keep.

(Updated below the fold)

The talk today will be this:

The emergence of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee as the deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch has underscored the potential complications in carrying out the executive order President Obama signed Thursday that the detention center be shut down within a year.

The militant, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September. He was released to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and passed through a Saudi rehabilitation program for former jihadists before resurfacing with Al Qaeda in Yemen.

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official.

Of course buried deeper in the article is this:

In the Internet statement, Al Qaeda in Yemen identified its new deputy leader as Abu Sayyaf al-Shihri, saying he returned from Guantánamo to his native Saudi Arabia and then traveled to Yemen “more than 10 months ago.” That corresponds roughly to the return of Mr. Shihri, a Saudi who was released from Guantánamo in November 2007. Abu Sayyaf is a nom de guerre, commonly used by jihadists in place of their real name or first name.

(emphasis added)

So this guy was released while Bush was still in office, but it’s now Obama’s fault. trying to say how it proves that Obama can’t close Gitmo.

Of course Obama never said he was “closing Gitmo and releasing everyone”. The plan is to close Gitmo, a place that has become a symbol of human rights violations around the world, and move the detainees to other places to be held. Obama said they would review every single case and decide what to do with each detainee. Besides, wouldn’t it be safer to have all these people separate instead of putting all our eggs in one basket? Also – shouldn’t we ask ourselves how well this Saudi rehabilitation program is working? He was supposed to be rehabbed by Saudi standards, but goes right back to terrorism. Considering how close Bush was with the Saudi royal family, I am not surprised by this failure in rehab.

Obama signs an executive order closing Gitmo within a year. He also signed another one saying we will interrogate pursuant to the Geneva Conventions and Army field manual

Got this in my inbox from ABC:

President Obama To Sign Executive Order Thursday to Close Gitmo Within a Year [4:20 p.m. ET]

He is working fast to erase the eight years of hell Bush put us through.

Last night President (shiver) Obama ordered the prosecutors at Gitmo to halt all cases for 120 days. Most likely this is so he can figure out what to do with the inmates and finally close down the black eye of the beacon of freedom.

One of the big arguments about Obama closing down Gitmo is what to do with all the inmates. Well we might have a solution now:

Switzerland is ready to consider taking in detainees from the U.S. prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba if that helps to shut it down, the Swiss government said on Wednesday.

"For Switzerland, the detention of people in Guantanamo is in conflict with international law. Switzerland is ready to consider how it can contribute to the solution of the Guantanamo problem," the government said in a statement.

Switzerland said it welcomed the expressed intention of U.S. President Barack Obama to close the prison and would investigate security and legal implications of possibly taking in detainees. About 255 men are still held there.

Help from the world. That’s something we haven’t seen in a very long time. It’s a sign of the change that is coming and the hope and optimism Obama has given the world. Of course I got a better idea for the detainees. Send them to live with Bush and Cheney.

This is a Bush administration official with direct knowledge admitting that we torture detainees:

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial has concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, interrogating him with techniques that included sustained isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity and prolonged exposure to cold, leaving him in a "life-threatening condition."

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani," said Susan J. Crawford, in her first interview since being named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in February 2007. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

Crawford, a retired judge who served as general counsel for the Army during the Reagan administration and as Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense, is the first senior Bush administration official responsible for reviewing practices at Guantanamo to publicly state that a detainee was tortured.

The indictment is now writing itself. There is already talk of Bush, Cheney and a bunch of other current and former administration officials facing war crime charges in Europe. For use to restore our standing in the world, Europe shouldn’t be put through the hassle. Our nation should be the one to prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. No leniency or anything – give it all to them. These are criminals that should not be allowed to walk.

On a related note, the evidence handling practices when it comes to detainees is in such chaos that it would give merit to any regular case being thrown out in our courts.

Last night on 60 Minutes, Barack Obama reiterated his promise to close down Gitmo.

I remember how much Republicans like Duncan Hunter loved to go out there and "brag" (for lack of a better term) about how we let the Red Cross visit the detainees at Gitmo. Well that turns out to be another lie told to the world by this administration.

That's what prosecutors are seeking for Guantanamo Bay detainees charged with connections to 9/11.

Sounds kind of convenient:

The US military has lost a year's worth of records describing the Guantanamo confinement of Osama bin Laden's driver, a prosecutor said at the Yemeni captive's war court hearing.

Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and could affect his ability to aid in his defence against war crimes charges.

"All known records have been produced with the exception of the 2002 Gitmo (A nickname for Guantanamo Bay) records," one of the prosecutors, Navy Lieutenant Commodore Timothy Stone, told the court. "They can't find it."

I would check in the same location as the waterboarding video tapes. It's a damn good chance you will find them there.