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NYT: Obama May Revive Gitmo Military Tribunals

By: Mr_Ed (Diary)  |  May 2nd, 2009 at 11:10 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Reeling from his public relations disaster on handling the waterboarding issue, Obama may be backtracking on his decision to try Gitmo detainees in U.S. criminal courts.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30531510/

Our President is proving to be an enigma.  On one hand, the longer he’s in office the more his innate liberal worldview becomes apparent.  On the other hand, he occasionally admits the Bush Administration had it right.  Let’s see how the liberal human rights organizations react to this news.

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  • Mike gamecock DeVine

    to be unwilling to take certain steps that would obviously increase the risk of more attacks here and to lose a trial of a terrorist. He is not giving up any of the executive power laws. He has talked about closing GITMO, talk only and Holder went to Europe to beg them to take some of the detainees.

    more later

    • redneck_hippie

      and rhetorically, with the backtracking on security issues, Obama seems to me to have only the appeasement mode as his operational principle.

      Natural inclination of course is appeasement of the left and thugs/dictators. When the main body politic revolts he appeases them (only as much as or for as long as necessary). Thus swinging and flitting about among important national concerns in order to preserve his power. He is the ultimate Clinton with the difference that he starts from a much leftier radical leftiness than Clinton ever dreamed of in the presidency. This ensures a country where the Constitution is at existential threa.

      • Mike gamecock DeVine

        some positions taken in court on detainees, surveillance orders of Bush not changed, etc

        Rarely does the word all apply to anything, and I am a stickler on such things.

        smile

        • redneck_hippie

          I’d like to hear him say Bush was right when he does these Uturns but no chance of that.

          • Mike gamecock DeVine

            gave Iraq when he recently visited but couldn’t bring himself to thank Bush nor admit that he would have denied Iraq the gift and missed the opportunity to kill tens of thousands of terrorists while Saddam gave them safe haven.

  • Flagstaff

    This article is all-around great.

    “Several officials insisted on anonymity because the administration has directed that no one publicly discuss the deliberations. ”

    The O isn’t any better at keeping mouths closed than W was.

    So many problems with Obama’s anti-human-caused-disaster policies. For instance, as Charles Krauthammer said Friday, “Obama acts as if the problem with Gitmo is a GEOGRAPHIC one.”

    **On the other hand, he occasionally admits the Bush Administration had it right.**

    Now, however, the military courts will have the Obama touch. There won’t be the same old Bush “…system of trying detainees [that] has been an enormous failure….?

    The elephant in the room throughout the whole fiasco is that any trial of terrorists in the standard US court system has an extremely high probability of returning a “not guilty” verdict for most defendants. They will then have to be released into the US population, or returned to another country, which WE CAN’T DO NOW AND WON’T BE ABLE TO DO THEN. The Uighers will look like Asian boy scouts compared to some who will be released.

    Lest you think I’m advocating a “hang ‘em all” policy, I don’t. Military courts, using rules of evidence appropriate for a wartime situation, would still be able to acquit those found to be innocent. They’d just be better suited to tell the difference.

    People need to understand that criminal trials mean that many defendants WILL BE RELEASED INTO THE US. Obama has just figured this out, and he’s trying to now figure out how to avoid it without appearing to be what he is:

    ?The more they look at it,? said one official, ?the more commissions don?t look as bad as they did on Jan. 20.?

    W made his first mistake by not declaring all the captured to be Prisoners of War. That would have made them distinct from ‘criminals’ to be tried in criminal court. F’Gawd’s sake, what CRIME have any of them committed? As POW’s they could be held until the war they declared is over.

    His second mistake was allowing the Federal Courts to claim any jurisdiction at all over the issue.

  • Mike gamecock DeVine

    Obama should have NO SECRET deliberations!