Stop The Gitmo Nonsense

[Said1]

super hottie....

Yep, that's her, and I couldn't agree more.

 

[Bonnie]

Yep, that's her, and I couldn't agree more.

That is a great Avatar Said!! She was such a glamorous beauty.

 

[Gunny]

the "truth" telling NY Times. Wake up sweetie. It's the MSM,LED BY THEIR STALWART, the NY times that can't tell the truth. Sorry sweetheart but the MSM is just a mouthpiece for the DNC. MSM, DNC, one and the same. That's why their subscribership and viewership are dropping like a stone. The American people are onto the MSM (AKA NY Times impersonators) darlin' and they ain't buyin' it anymore.

Please don't hold back. YOu left out the Washington Post. If they WP said the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and verify it before I'd accept their word for it.

If they aren't equal in their left-slanted crapola, they are a close second.

 

[Annie]

I read a bit, somehow I missed this in the MSM:

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/mm20050622.shtml

Debunking another Gitmo myth
Michelle Malkin (archive)

June 22, 2005

Newsweek. Amnesty International. Jimmy Carter. Dick Durbin. The Guantanamo Bay-bashing continues.

In a rant published Tuesday, the Minnesota Star Tribune actually castigated Durbin for "caving in" on his slanderous remarks comparing U.S. treatment of detainees at Gitmo to torture and genocide by Nazis, Soviets and Pol Pot. The paper wrote that Durbin shouldn't have apologized and decried the entire operation as a "hellhole."

But it's not just unhinged liberals who keep piling on.

The "maverick" Sen. John McCain echoed one of the Left's most oft-cited and erroneous complaints about Gitmo on NBC's "Meet The Press" this weekend -- that detainees have been denied trials:

"The weight of evidence has got to be that we've got to adjudicate these people's cases, and . . . if it means releasing some of them, you'll have to release them. Look, even Adolf Eichmann got a trial." (Can we put a lid on the Nazi analogies already? Crikey. A Knight-Ridder reporter was too smitten to be bothered by his Eichmann-invoking hyperbole: "McCain is emerging as a voice of conscience and nuance on the stay-or-go Guantanamo issue." Nuance?)​

GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham, another newly christened "maverick" who appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball" last week, lodged similar allegations about the absence of trials for Gitmo detainees:

"We need a procedure and process that will allow us to determine who an enemy combatant is, interrogate them to make us safer in a humane way, and set up trials for the worst offenders and repatriate those who -- who don't meet the category of a -- of a threat. That, to me, would look good to the world. It would make us safer."​

My friend, Judge Andrew Napolitano, made a similar assertion on Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" last week:

"The government is not giving them those trials."​

And now, the facts:

Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called "Combatant Status Review Tribunals," are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as "enemy combatants" is based.

Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration's failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, "the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the 'Article V' hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court's 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case."

Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters -- with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial -- is a surefire recipe for another 9/11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system -- long established in wartime -- in the first place.

The few critics who acknowledge the existence of the tribunals argue they aren't sufficient. They "provided due process in form, but not in substance," as Newsday put it. That view is shared by a Carter-appointed liberal judge, but an earlier decision by a Bush-appointed judge upheld the tribunals. In the end, courts will almost certainly affirm the legality of the Gitmo tribunals, which, as noted, were modeled after the due process standards described in the Hamdi decision.

That ruling, may I remind you, addressed the detention of a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant. As former Attorney General William Barr noted last week in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Obviously, if these procedures are sufficient for American citizens, they are more than enough for foreign detainees."

Do John McCain and the anti-Gitmo gang actually believe otherwise, or are they too clueless to realize the implications of their gulag-Pol Pot-Nazi-Eichmann-hellhole harangues?

 

[Annie]

One of the best writers around, should get more syndication:

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks062205.html

Here's What You Need to Know About Gitmo

BY JAMES LILEKS
c.2005 Newhouse News Service


Gitmo is the gulag equivalent of a Ben Affleck movie: no one's seen it, but everyone has an opinion about it. Given all the rhetoric that's been spilled about this sorta-kinda-not-really Death Camp, it's time we re-examine the facts, and remind ourselves what's really at stake. Herewith a summation.

Q: What is Gitmo?

A: Contrary to what some suggest, it does not stand for "Git mo' Peking chicken for Muhammad, he wants a second portion." It stands for "Guantanamo," a facility the United States built to see if the left would ever care about human rights abuses in Cuba. The experiment has apparently been successful.

Q: Who's in Gitmo?

A: Operation Scoop Up The Little Lost Lambs plucked men from distant countries and brought them to Gitmo to beat them deaf for no apparent reason. There are between 400 and 30 million people at Gitmo, and somewhere between zero and 15 million people have died there.

Q: That's quite the range. Do we have precise figures?

A: Well, technically, no one has died at Gitmo. Metaphorically, millions have perished, since Gitmo is the spiritual heir to assorted thug regimes -- except Saddam's, of course. Think Nazi death camps. Did you know one of the Nazis' Middle East allies was the grand mufti of Jerusalem, a Hitler admirer who was a mentor to Yasser Arafat? Funny how history works. Not ha-ha funny, but Seinfeld-ironic funny.

Q: History is boring. C'mon. Why do they hate us?

A: Because our women wear thongs, our media are naughty, our homosexuals walk around unstoned, and we refuse to let them finish Hitler's plans for the Jews. Because we are the infidel sons of monkeys and pigs who do not believe that most holy of books, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Also because we had something to do with Afghanistan.

Q: Afghana-what?

A: Afghanistan is a large, mountainous country that suffered an unimaginable geographical calamity a few years ago, when the entire nation slid off the front pages of the newspapers. Poor country: not a single runaway Caucasian bride to interest the media.

Q: Why can't the prisoners be given trials?

A: Because civil libertarians might injure themselves as they race to defend the "terrorist suspects" and collide in the airport jetways. Because the left seems to think the detainees were arrested for the crime of "being swarthy in Afghanistan," and there are no such specific charges in the U.S. criminal code. Finally, if convicted, the "terrorists" would go into the U.S. federal pens, where the food is worse and they are subject to brutal rape. We reserve that for recidivist marijuana wholesalers.

Q: What forms of torture do they use in Gitmo?

A: The interrogators make a point of handling the Quran with gloves, to indicate they accept the prisoners' definition of infidels as "unclean." But the guards occasionally suggest that the gloves are not only washed with the general laundry that might include the socks of Jews, but that sometimes the anti-static cling sheets are deliberately left out.

Q: It might all be worth it if we learned something. Have we learned anything?

A: Who knows? We have to err on the side of self-castigating doubt, reflexive suspicion of the military, and a churlish institutional bias against reporting anything other than bad news that might sap the national will. So let's assume the interrogators learned nothing.

Q: Wow. This is bad.

A: It is. It's worse than Waco, because at least those people aren't suffering anymore.

Q: When did they build this place?

A: After Sept. 11, 2001.

Q: That date seems familiar for some reason. Did something happen?

A: Not really. You can roll over and go back to sleep.

Q: Isn't it our role as citizens to be wary of government?

A: Sure. But take this quote: "I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisers to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad." That was Sen. Dick Durbin in 1998, when Bill Clinton attacked Iraq. But that was then, and this is George W. Bush.

June 22, 2005

 

[Bonnie]

Kathianne

One of the best writers around, should get more syndication:

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks062205.html

Wow one of my new favorites

 

[Annie]

Kathianne
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks062205.html

Wow one of my new favorites

Welcome, he is really good.

 

[Annie]

Unfortunately all I can find are Durbin related or AI related. Then there's this. Yeah, I know it's not 'authoratative', but I think it speaks more to the truth than some of the false analogies thrown about the last week:

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050619/COLUMNIST0106/506190370/1100/OPINION

Up close, these are the nastiest of prisoners

John Krenson is a deacon at The Cathedral in Nashville.

He is married and is raising two small children.


And he loves his country and state so much that he volunteered 19 years ago to serve in the Tennessee Army National Guard. There, he has risen to the rank of major and returned from a year in Afghanistan.

And as an intelligence specialist, he came face to face with the kind of men incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

This weekend, the big news media outlets will continue to beat the drum over Gitmo and seek out more congressmen and women to say the facility should be closed. More critics will be given a forum to call Gitmo "a gulag" even though that definition requires thousands to be killed. And comments by Illinois' Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin — comparing our soldiers at Gitmo to Nazis — will be amplified.

Yet someone such as Krenson will not have a broad forum to tell the truth about the war on terror, the circumstances in Afghanistan from which these terrorists came and to defend the good name of our men and women in uniform.

"I worked with people who had worked at Gitmo earlier, I worked with people who worked at the primary detention facility in AFG, and I visited that facility many times. I saw detainees (many times on their prayer rugs, other times reading, other times talking when they were not allowed to). I saw the interrogation rooms. I worked with the soldiers and the leaders who ran this place.

"I know those operations fairly well, and I got to know the people who ran those operations — both active duty and reservists. They are normal Americans. They are good decent people who believed in what they were doing. Americans — including Sen. Durbin — can be and should be proud of them.

"Be assured the worst of the worst detainees are the ones at Gitmo. It took a lot of effort to get a detainee shipped over … . They are no victims. … Their victims are most often Afghan villagers who have risked their lives simply to vote or are construction and aid workers from around the world who are assisting Afghanistan to modernize and develop. The detainees at Gitmo are the ringleaders and verified trigger-pullers in these incidents.

"This is serious business with tens and hundreds of thousands of lives at stake. People have already lost lives because we've released Gitmo detainees. I read those reports, when they were captured — a second time. I can't print the words we used in AFG when we found out a soldier died at the hands of a terrorist released from Gitmo. Gitmo didn't make them want to kill again. Their release allowed them to kill again."
​

In the war on terror, information saves more lives than tanks. Krenson said he just helped brief 100 Tennessee Guardsmen who will be advisers and trainers to the Afghan National Army throughout Afghanistan and be a big part of election security for upcoming parliamentary elections.

"I saw their bus pull out when they left their families behind, and it took me back to that day when I boarded a bus to leave my family. This time, I knew where those guys were going and what they would be doing. I was proud of them. They are us. These men on that bus were local business owners, school teachers, neighbors, you name it."​

Gitmo terrorists want these Guardsmen stopped before more democracy takes root. And their compatriots who are still free would like to kill these Guardsmen without adhering to Geneva Convention rules for combatants to identify themselves and not target civilians. Information from Gitmo terrorists who know these compatriots and their organizations can prevent more deaths.

Americans trust our military to do the right thing — at Gitmo or wherever — in balancing the need for information and also be humane. A recent Gallup poll showed 74% of Americans surveyed expressed trust in the military. That's because the military is us. And more John Krensons returning home alive as deacons in their churches, fathers in their families and heroes in their communities is most important — not the political agendas of U.S. senators and big media. •

 

[colehart]

Come up with a better plan or..... SHUT UP!

 

[Annie]

Come up with a better plan or..... SHUT UP!

Ummm, to whom is this directed? Who should shut up or come up with a better plan?