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The defenders of Gitmo in this era will be remembered by our descendants with the same shame and disgust we feel when remembering the slave holders and segregat
by lbarrow 14y ago
The defenders of Gitmo in this era will be remembered by our descendants with the same shame and disgust we feel when remembering the slave holders and segregationists of the previous eras.
- skyraider 14y agoI hope that the defenders of the legal theories that allow people to be held without trial for many years get their fair share of the blame. Gitmo itself is bad, but the legal theories that let almost anyone be held there without due process are worse. I understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups. But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity? There's a reason that US citizens have rights like due process (and you can see why everyone should get them, including Gitmo prisoners): If you can't prove it but refuse to let the defendant maintain the freedom that should be associated with presumption of innocence, you get incarceration of the type described in the original posting.
- mattkopecki 14y ago> But is looking bad in the media worth human dignity? Of course not. But, is you looking bad in the media worth someone else's human dignity? That's a much easier sell.
- lbarrow 14y agoI hope so, but it doesn't seem to be happening: after John Yoo finished his work at the Bush DoJ, he got a cushy position at Berkeley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Yoo
- pacdavidson 14y agoActually, as the wikipedia entry states, he has been on Berkeley's faculty since 1993. His return to Berkeley after being seconded to Bush's DoJ was met with heated resistance and continual protest (e.g. waterboarding enactments outside the law school). As a tenured professor, though, he couldn't be tossed out.
- Joeri 14y agoI don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution. These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.
- declan 14y agoI suspect you may not know the way tenure works, especially at a public institution.
- potatolicious 14y agoTenure doesn't work this way. The whole idea about tenure is to give academics the freedom to pursue things that are controversial to the public - i.e., you can research controversial things without being tossed out by the angry mob. You can afford to go full-bore on your research rather than play politics and PR with the public. Tossing one tenured professor out is a simple thing. After all like you said, it's not written down in the constitution. The problem with removing tenure is that it destroys trust in the tenure system. If one professor is stripped of tenure for being controversial, then no one is safe. For this reason the only way to lose tenure is to do something illegal, since that's really the only line you can draw that doesn't move very much. Tenure is an all or nothing deal. The entire effect of protecting your faculty is completely nullified as soon as you violate your principle for one guy. The floodgates open and suddenly every prof that's doing something controversial becomes a target.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoViolating international law against torture is not "controversial", it's criminal.
- Djehngo 14y agoHe will be classified as a criminal when and if the courts convict him as one. Until then what he did is irrelevant to his tenure due to the concerns raised by potatolicious.
- twoodfin 14y agoI understand that it looks bad if people released from custody in Gitmo return to action in 'violent non-state actor' groups. Just for the record, if you're a victim of one of these released prisoners, it would be more serious for you than simply bad press.
- femto 14y agoIf that is something that needs to be taken into account, we should all be locked up, just in case we do something wrong in the future. If a prisoner has done something wrong charge and try him, otherwise he is innocent and should be released. If we dismantle that principle, we are in far greater danger from our own than from any external force.
- tripzilch 14y agoHow can you judge? "On the record", even!! Isn't one of the major problems that it's unknown whether these people are even guilty of anything or not? No trial, remember? So how can you suddenly know and decide "for the record" what any one of these prisoners will do if they get out? Is the man in the article lying then? He says he's innocent. Of course he would. But who are you to decide one or the other?
- rayiner 14y agoWhat do you mean "almost everyone?" The only people in Guantanamo are foreigners. The Supreme Court struck down the other "theories" in a series of cases starting with Hamdi v. Rumsfeld: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdi_v._Rumsfeld http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdi_v._Rumsfeld.
- erre 14y agoWell, Wikipedia estimates the world population at ~7 billion people, and the US population at 315 million. So, "almost everyone" in the world is not an American citizen.
- jnxfgf456 14y agoWell, the slave holders were all-the-way wrong, like the proponents of Mexican "they will take the agricultural jobs White people won't" apologist-plantation-owners. But the segregationists, black and white alike, were absolutely right.
- cmsmith 14y agoI'm not defending gitmo, but why wouldn't we remember its defenders the same way we remember those who have suspended habeas corpus in previous eras [1]? [1] Abraham Lincoln : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_States#Suspension_during_the_Civil_War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_Sta...
- wyager 14y agoLincoln was not the man we make him out to be. The Emancipation Proclamation was purely political. Lincoln wanted to split the country and pick up the bigger half. I suspect that, if not for the Emancipation Proclamation, we might call Lincoln a bad president.
- vxNsr 14y agoI suspect that you have no idea what you are talking about and like many others on the internet, like to marginalize good people with your 20/20 hindsight. What does that even mean? What would Lincoln gain by splitting the country in half? Do you even bother thinking about points before you make them?
- wyager 14y ago>What would Lincoln gain by splitting the country in half? Do you understand that this is the single most successful way to political success in a historically bipartisan political system? This is how American politics works (and always has worked). Political parties make a big deal out of what are small issues in other countries in order to try to polarize the American public. The emancipation proclamation was simply one of these polarizing tactics. Here are a few Abraham Lincoln quotes you might enjoy: >“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” >“Negro equality! Fudge! How long, in the government of a god, great enough to make and maintain this universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagogue-ism as this?” >"there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality." >"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" >"In the course of his reply, Senator Douglas remarked, in substance, that he had always considered this government was made for the White people and not for the negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too."
- rayiner 14y agoPeople barely even register Japanese internment, and those were actual Americans.