More Than 150 Organizations Call to Close Guantánamo on 21st Anniversary
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
There was an UN vote to try to stop the sanction against cuba... the result? 185 vs 2 - 185 to stop the sanctions, 2 (brazil, ukraine) abstained and 2 countries voted to continue the sanctions (israel and of course USA).
Until this becomes an internal USA issue affecting the elections, and when the propaganda doesn't help anymore with that, things will change... but for now, nothing will happen, waterbordings will continue while the politicians point fingers at other countries for stuff way less sever than whan usa has done in the last few decades.
If true, I've discovered why voting for your opposite choice could be a valid option if you care about a specific issue like this.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/11/close-guan...
Here's the current list if you want to dig deeper into it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_detainees_at_G...
The Federal Prison system like all aspects of the Federal government are subject to Senatorial review and while technically you only need enough votes, not necessarily the home Senators approval, the Senate does like to remain collegial and so there’s some things they don’t do unto each other when there’s a Presidential agenda to hold up instead, like at the time: Obama’s. Every Federal penitentiary is in some Senator’s State, and given how controversial it was to put militant combatants anywhere near, let alone through the United States criminal justice system, it’s not happening.
Technically, if Congress wanted to house foreign terrorists in the DC city jail, there wouldn’t be anything that could legally hold up an Act of Congress to do so. They’re not motivated nor interested enough to do so, and a city jail isn’t the best place when there’s a Federal Supermax over in Colorado and Guantanamo Bay over in Cuba.
It’s not that legally we can’t, it’s just whatever political benefits there are to it are outweighed by political risks to individual members of Congress. The prisoner population of Gitmo is a problem nobody wants, and keeping them there is as good a reason as any to maintain sovereignty in the area in the face of a hostile foreign government.
Over the course of Guantanamo’s existence under 1000 men and boys have been extrajudicially detained and tortured there. Expanding this well known data by an order of magnitude (plus a little) gives a conservative estimate of 50000 individuals extrajudicially detained under post 9/11 foreign policy (just a guess at totals based on roughly how many of these prisons were built in the bush era).
Actually it kind of does, a pretty important quality of a "gulag" is the scale, and another was its domestic focus.
Also, the comparison also fails because (I understand) a major goal of the gulag system was the acquisition of slave labor.
So on the one hand, you have a massive prison system used for domestic oppression, imprisoning citizens in physically lethal conditions and exploited for slave labor. On the other hand you have a much smaller prison, exclusively housing foreigners, used for no profitable labor of any kind.
If you don't pay attention to the details, you can make any comparison you want, but they'll be worthless comparisons.
The problem is that this particular analogy isn't helpful because it's more misleading than elucidating and there are better analogies that could be made. The only thing going for this analogy was its tendentiousness.
Also, IIRC, people who were sent to the gulags did have trials, they were just unfair.
And that doesn't count people killed or otherwise uprooted.
Meanwhile, you went to gitmo if you were an armed combatant in an insurgency, or had a leadership/support role in a terrorist attack against US or her allies.
Read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago for a clear example of a) how Communist/Marxist/Leninist states are irrevocably totalitarian and b) how GITMO is not even remotely comparable to a gulag.
The book is a remarkable and often painful read. Not because of how it is written, but because what it is written about - a demonstration of the machinations and inevitable outcome of socialist states.
Wow. And, all that - without a trial.
That is a lie.
Mere suspicion, or a similar name, or being a relative or associate, was sufficient.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Guantanamo_Bay_detaine...
> 779 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Although most of these have been released without charge, the United States government continues to classify many of these released detainees as "enemy combatants". As of January 5, 2017, 55 detainees remained at Guantanamo. By January 19, 2017, at the end of the Obama Administration, the detention center remained open with 41 detainees remaining.
Assuming all released are innocent and all that remaining are guilty, there is a 95% chance to go to Guantanamo and be innocent. (The number goes up following basic human right like "innocent until proven guilty".)
Detaining people as POWs, and treating them well, prevents them from causing harm without oppressing innocents.
Incorrect – this issue was specifically litigated; they are entitled under international law, because the war is war where one of the belligerents is not a state, occurring in the territory of a party to the Conventions, to the protections of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which applies to “conflicts not of an international character”. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006).
But as a practical matter the decisions aren't being made based on evidence. There is non-zero risk that the prisoners could be dangerous and no US state or foreign country is willing to take the political risk of accepting them. And the US federal government can't really force anyone to take them.
"We'll make up this meaningless word, and this will allow us to keep people with NO EVIDENCE AT ALL and torture them for 20 fucking years!"
The whole thing is horrifying. It makes a mockery of the law and of morality.
It would have been a lot kinder just to murder them.
It's disgusting. America is just the shittiest place.
The even recently killed US citizens (dad and his children) in several drone strikes without any due process. Obama first (dad and son), then Trump (daughter). Maybe he did commit crimes that deserve capital punishment, but he was given no trial.
But still kinder than years of torture, i agree.
> America is just the shittiest place.
An understatement imho.
Some had some kind of process (fairness is, at best, dubious in most cases), but even some of those who were never charged under any system, and have been cleared for transfer or release, remain detained to this day.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/12/us-unauthor...
A great example is when the Democrats pretended to oppose the 2017 tax reform law and then refused to repeal it when they had the majority and Presidency.
Immigration cannot be illegal. Only behaviors after immigration can be illlegal under domestic law.
The US can take actions against immigrants, How can the US pass a law that exclusively binds to foreigners in a foreign country? That violates sovereignty.
Honest question
Edit: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/immigrat...
nobody is not really nobody then. clearly the prisoners want it closed.
closing gitmo it admitting error: those who do not want to admit error are the ones who want to keep it open. apart from them, it's really nobody.
It's all propaganda either way.
Once it will be closed it will be presented as someone success: suuuure.
If they are found innocent in a trial, they should be at their home with a compensation. If this is not possible they could be offered the citizenship as a way to repair the injustice after a careful examination of each case. One case at a time
My bet would be that that keeping opened guantanamo with a stream of taxes is making somebody, somewhere really rich
Guantanamo is a security hazard for the image of US just because it exists.
In theory you are 100% correct. In practice this would require authorization from Congress, and would never get passed for fear of having to campaign against "So-and-so put terrorists in your backyard." It's a perverse NIMBYism.
Though, part of that problem is that we also live in a world where the electorate also makes unrealistic demands on politicians, and will punish them if they don't get the promises they demand. I think that's especially true in primaries when it's mainly activists that can really push for promises that are not especially popular.
Which isn't to let anyone off the hook, just to note it's one of those difficult problems that's composed of interlocking problems that reinforce each other.
It misses the forest for the trees and provides an excuse for allowing the very problem it describes to grow and become worse.
Go and try to lease a house forever on a fixed price - let me know how you get on
US real estate and contract law has zero relevance here so I don't know why you would bring that up.
So if Russia did not ratify UN convention on war crimes, then their behaviour in Ukraine is okay?
You seem to have no grasp of international law at all.
Article 52 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties:
“a treaty is void if its conclusion has been procured by the threat or use of force.”
The Platt Amendment and accompanying Agreement could have violated this article because the leasing provision was a threatening ultimatum. The first Cuban government extended the lease with unequal bargaining power: Cuba understood that U.S. military forces would remain on the island if the leasing arrangement was not made
Cuba may hold that the United States breached the lease Agreement under Article 60 of the Vienna Convention - Lease was for a naval base, not an illegal detention camp.
https://www.nyujilp.org/guantanamo-bays-quasi-colonial-statu...
I come from a different angle where I see these as the vestigial artefacts of colonialism and we should be adults in the room entrusted to "fix the map".
Point Roberts should go to Canada. St Pierre and Miquelon should also be part of Canada. Puerto Rico should be a either a US state or a sovereign nation. Same goes for Guam, Marina Islands, Virgin Islands and American Samoa. There's dozens of things like this.
I frankly don't care about arguments of power. We should be relying on better behavior and not devolve into covetous impudent children acting like whiney teenaged monarchs from 500 years ago.
We will never be able to successfully tackle the global problems of 21st century pollution, climate change, resource allocation, etc, if we insist on acting like adolescent brats playing Risk.
It'll probably save a bunch of money as well. The British maintaining the Falklands and Gibraltar probably isn't cheap.
After that we should start returning cultural artifacts captured in war that have been requested back but held up in the victors museums for decades. It's time to move forward and start being adults.
We're going to have to do it eventually. Whether that's now or in a hundred years after making things worse is up to us.
There is no best outcome, only least worst outcome, at this point.
EDIT: and for the downvoters, you realize that if we do nothing they will spend the rest of their lives in prison without a trial, right? And worse, the base will remain open and available for more torture.
Seriously, these are non-state actors who were detained for some reason or another. From a political point of view there's no real downside to keeping these people there forever, and there are no real upsides to releasing them.
The various ISIS brides are in the same boat: nobody wants them back and nobody wants to re-integrate them. They've shown red by abandoning their society for the caliphate of barbarians, so that point why not just leave them to rot? Because we're nicer?
Innocent untillvproven guitly.
You are advocating a slippery slope to medieval justice: If you float, you're a witch; if you drown you were guilty of some other crime. Only divine intervention was evidence of "true" innocence.