I'd Like to Say Something about Closing Gitmo
Guantanamo Bay is an embarrassment to the principles we as a nation's citizenry are meant to uphold. Before we can begin to keep our heads up high, we must recognize that the government is servile to the Constitution, and the Constitution forbids government from pursuing indefinite waivers of certain fundamental judicial procedures, meant to
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I am wholeheartedly in favor of detaining POWs without civil due process, so long as the guidelines established by the Geneva Conventions are followed. That those imprisoned at Guantanamo are existing in a pre-arraignment limbo is what truly muddies the issue, and causes me no shortage of concern. It's the aspect of it all that creates the conflict amongst those who seek a resolution and don't just bandy about catchphrases and threaten with senseless doomsaying, on both sides. ("The terrorists will kill more people if we let them out" & "Guantanamo is degrading our culture and will lead to Big Brother government" are equally reprehensible demagogueries to me.)
But while these men have not been determined combatants, ancillary cohorts (such as Bin Laden's famed driver), or wholly innocent, I cannot support their indefinite internment. By all means, lock up the zealots. Before that sentence should be carried out, though, it should be through some kind of court or tribunal, and not this de facto excreta bovinum.
So Guantanamo, as it is now, should be closed or reformed beyond recognition, either as a prison for people tried and convicted of terrorist plots and/or actions aimed at the United States, or returned to its status as a lonely, lowly point of observation for the Castros' Cuba.
"Shoot them all and let God sort everything out," as far as I can remember, is a term coined in or about the Vietnam War Era. It could be earlier, though, and I don't recall the identity of the originator, if it is known at all.
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