Tag: gitmo

#rsrh Gitmo closing opposition hits 60%.

Said opposition is back to levels of opposition of, say, 2005, when the country was breathing a sigh of relief that we managed not to elect that Kerry guy*.  Not that this will matter, except for the two or three more Democratic Members of Congress who would lose their jobs if the administration decides to charge this particular hill…

(via @allahpundit)

Moe Lane

*Hey, it’s OK.  That election’s been over for over five years, now.  Democrats can come out and admit that they had to get drunk and pound themselves in the head with a hammer** before they felt up to the task of voting for John Kerry.

**As the saying goes: because it felt so good when they stopped.

#rsrh ‘Gitmo’s Indefensible Lawyers.’

Oh, my aching head (Via Glenn Reynolds).

Look, I understand that lawyers have to sometimes defend scumbags. And sometimes lawyers have to defend women-beating, Jew-hating, homosexual-murdering, psychopathic fantasy ideologist scumbags. But decent lawyers – as in, ‘not evil’ – do not brag about succeeding in that defense.

And the government should not hire from the pool of lawyers who brag.

Please. Fight us on this. Please.

Moe Lane

*I do not concede that we should be necessarily putting these particular women-beating, Jew-hating, homosexual-murdering, psychopathic fantasy ideologist scumbags through our civilian court system, mind you.

Administration cuts and runs on NYC KSM trial.

(H/T: @andylevy) Amazing what one Senatorial election can do. Like, say, make a Presidential administration pay attention to local political concerns for a change.

The Obama administration has abandoned its plan to put Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, on trial in Lower Manhattan, according to administration officials.

The reversal marks the latest setback for an administration that has been buffeted at every turn as it seeks to close the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And without the backdrop of Ground Zero for a trial, the administration will also lose some of the rich symbolism associated with its attempt to forge a new approach to handling high-value al-Qaeda detainees.

“New York is out,” said an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the decision had not yet been officially announced. “We’re considering other options.”

Try Gitmo. The unilateralist, simplisme cowboy put them there in the first place for a reason, you know. In fact, he actually had a reason for pretty much everything he did…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

‘Regime,’ is it?

Slapdash, or scaredy-cat?  Does it matter?

The lack of self-respect in the Obama administration astounds me, sometimes.  From the (probably-now abortive) pushback on the call to shut down repatriating AQ terrorists to Yemen:

“I am aware of a lot of people pointing back at the way the transfers were handled under the Bush administration that apparently they have some concerns about that,” said the official, who had not seen the senators’ letter. “I didn’t hear many of those concerns at the time, but there were obviously hundreds and hundreds of detainees that were transferred under the old regime.”

The official hadn’t also seen Sen. Feinstein’s (D) own shared concern about said repatriation, which as Ed Morrissey notes is a serious problem for the drive to close Gitmo.  But never mind that, right now: what gives with all the unforced errors?  I mean, if this was an unintentional attempt to give offense, it’s pretty sloppy thinking; and if it was intentional, well, way to go with putting words in the administration’s mouth there, Sparky.  A true progressive would have had the elementary courage to put his or her Bush Derangement Syndrome on the record.

Well, either way I can’t say that I’m surprised.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

What *does* happen if KSM walks?

(Via Hot Air Headlines) Ben Lerner asks a couple of questions that this administration doesn’t want to answer:

So what happens if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 masterminds, whose trials Attorney General Eric Holder has decided will take place in the criminal justice system in New York, get off on a technicality or are somehow O.J.-Simpsoned by a jury? Can we still hold them? If not, where do they go?

At its simplest, one of two things will happen:

  1. They get let go.  That means that the guy who planned the 1993 WTC attack and the murder of Daniel Pearl (to give just two examples) walks out onto an American street, free and happy.
  2. They stay locked up, and to the Devil with the court system.  No, I don’t [expletive deleted] know why captured terrorists were given legal rights and a trial if an unfavorable result was going to be ignored anyway, either.

Those are the options: media circus, or show trials.  The administration had better well hope they do a better job at handling this than they have at… well, everything… so far.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

POTUS visits Objective Reality on Gitmo.

(Via Hot Air) Took him long enough:

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

[snip]

On Guantánamo, Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

Translation: Gitmo isn’t closing in 2010, either – which means that it probably isn’t closing, period.  Which is something that I’ve known was going to be happening for months.  But then, I’m not the Fortunate Son.

Moe Lane

PS: Next time?  Run for and serve as Governor of something, Mr. President.  It helps cut down on rookie mistakes like this.

Crossposted to RedState.

White House still on track for not closing Gitmo.

They’ve got a deadline coming up, but the Democrats are confident that they can let the clock run out without actually closing the facility that they’ve carefully turned into the symbol of all American governmental evil over the last eight years. It’ll require a tremendous amount of baldfaced lying and epic-level hypocrisy, but the Democrats are up to the challenge. They were born for this.

Still, don’t worry: it’ll still all be Bush’s fault.

White House Counsel Gregory B. Craig, who initially guided the effort to close the prison and who was an advocate of setting the deadline, is no longer in charge of the project, two senior administration officials said this week.

Craig said Thursday that some of his early assumptions were based on miscalculations, in part because Bush administration officials and senior Republicans in Congress had spoken publicly about closing the facility. “I thought there was, in fact, and I may have been wrong, a broad consensus about the importance to our national security objectives to close Guantanamo and how keeping Guantanamo open actually did damage to our national security objectives,” he said.

I wait with baited breath for the day that this administration announces that the stubborn patch of crabgrass on the White House lawn is due to Republican operatives sneaking onto the grounds at night to spread seeds. My best guess? Probably May of 2011. They’ll announce it on a Friday, so as to distract from explaining why they still hadn’t closed Gitmo, repealed DoMA, or ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The impossible Gitmo deadline: 24 hours?

It wasn’t until I read this AoSHQ post about the delay in the detention report (preliminary details here) that I started counting off the months on my fingers.  Six months from July 21st makes… January 21st, more or less.

The work of a Justice Department-led task force, which had been scheduled to send a report on detention policy to President Obama on Tuesday, will be extended for six months, according to senior administration officials. A second task force examining interrogation policy will get a two-month extension to complete its work, which had also been due Tuesday.

[snip]

The officials said the administration remains committed to closing the prison in Cuba by January 2010…

I fail to see how.  After the fold is the relevant text of the original Executive Order: note that it is dated January 22, 2009. Continue reading The impossible Gitmo deadline: 24 hours?

Today is the day for the Gitmo Report!

That’d be the one mandated by the President’s 01/22/2009 Executive Order that was supposed to reflect a clean break with the past; it’s supposed to be a review and critique of our detention policy, particular those of illegal combatants.  It and a review of interrogation techniques (mandated by this Executive Order) were scheduled for today, and both are absolutely necessary for the administration to have if they want to close down Gitmo.  Having these out will be a real shot in the arm for progressives who feel that the White House is dragging its feet on this issue…

Obama’s Gitmo Task Force Blows Its Deadline

An Obama administration task force set up to develop a plan for the closure of the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay will miss its first deadline this week—and put off a key report—amid continued divisions over how to resolve one of the president’s thorniest policy dilemmas.

The task force, set up on Obama’s second day in office, was charged with preparing a report to the president by Tuesday, July 21, outlining a long-term detention plan for detainees captured in counterterrorism operations after Sept. 11. But continued debate within the task force over the legal basis for holding detainees who are not charged with any crimes—and where to house them once they are moved from Guantánamo—has forced the task force to postpone its report by a “few months,” a senior administration official told NEWSWEEK.

Or not. Via @allahpundit. Continue reading Today is the day for the Gitmo Report!

Annnnd there’s the White House turning back to indefinite detention.

Let’s see: Mark Sanford’s disgraced, Michael Jackson’s dead, that couple that everybody else in the universe obsessed over divorced or something, and the Democrats in Congress managed to pass the Twenty-First century’s answer to Smoot-Hawley – yes, this would be a nigh-perfect time to break the news that indefinite detention’s back on the agenda. The only way that it would have been better timing would have been if Tiger Woods had broken his leg again, in fact.

White House Is Drafting Executive Order to Allow Indefinite Detention of Terror Suspects

The Obama administration, fearing a battle with Congress that could stall plans to close the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, is drafting an executive order that would reassert presidential authority to incarcerate terrorism suspects indefinitely, according to three senior government officials with knowledge of White House deliberations.

Such an order would embrace claims by former president George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.

Not much else to say, except of course that this isn’t really a surprise. It’s Gitmo or extraordinary rendition; other countries need to be bribed or browbeaten into openly taking our illegal combatants, and they are certainly distinctly unwelcome on American soil. If I had to guess, we’re going to end up with extraordinary rendition – and no, that isn’t the right answer.

Not my responsibility, though: I voted for the other guy.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.