Hacker News Reader

Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

Congress deserves as much or more blame for this situation. They've prevented the President from carrying out his intended solution to this problem. Without their support, he is powerless to release these people.

View on HN

This is absolute nonsense. The US president, wrapping himself in the role of commander in chief, does just about anything he wants if it's even loosely connected to war or security, with or without congressional approval. Surveillance. Torture. Black sites. Assassination. Drone murders. Infinite detention. If he wanted Gitmo closed, he could close it. Congress won't give him the budget? Fine, he could order the closing as a military operation. He doesn't want to take the political heat. I voted for him (2008), but he is without testicular fortitude on this issue.

Alas, naïveté in the political system. How I knew you.

I don't see how his answer was naive. I think we've reached a low point as a people if believing an elected official will actually attempt to keep his campaign promises is naive.

On the other hand, it would be nice indeed if people understood the political process. Obama has attempted action on Gitmo (however long ago that was).

But, Congress has not only not supported closing down Gitmo and sending the prisoners "home" (to whatever home means), they have explicitly forbidden it in their defense appropriation bills going back for years.

And people here say that Obama should break the law he was elected to enforce this time, just not all the other times that the law is in their favor.

And either way, the first person he gives the direct order to break the law to will refuse to carry it out (since it's an unlawful order), and then that breakdown in command & control will be the end of Obama's Presidency. It must be nice being an HN commenter, there's a reason Obama's hair is rapidly turning gray.

Who did you vote for in 2012? Ron Paul?

Guantanamo has nothing to do with congress. It was effectively authorized in this 2001 executive order:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/mo-111301.htm

Rescinding that executive order doesn't make magic happen. There is the process of closing down and what to do with the prisoners that matters. It's sounding like Congress is tying the President's hands by restricting his ability to use funds (funds that Congress authorizes) towards those goals. If you're in the US and you want this to happen, I would look towards your representatives in Congress, and research these bills.

This rings similar to the 'legalize marijuana' issue. Making it legal 'tomorrow' would be a massive undertaking because of all of the infrastructure that's in place with the assumption that it's illegal.

Sometimes decisions/actions seem 'easy' on the surface, while the devil is in the details.

Yet leaving it illegal is the problem we face on both counts. I dont see why youre bothering to state this nonsense in the form of an argument against doing the right thing. It would have been easier to do nothing in the first place yet here we bloody well are.

I would support you if you want to go after the people that made this happen, that said if you want to clean up the mess as it currently is, then you'll have to work out how to get it done. Complaining about how it shouldn't have happened in the first place doesn't translate into action now to remedy the situation.

I wasn't complaining, I was simply replying in kind. Good job on catching that.

I find it interesting that you referenced http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali... at a time in the United States when two states have in fact legalized Marijuana. I think this simply highlights the point that change for the better is possible if the people want it enough. What does this mean for Gitmo? Could we apply the same sort of sidestep? I.E. a small forward-thinking community with a not terribly overworked prosecutor petitions to have them tried there? As I remember from back in 2009, the biggest issue was that our congresscritters were screaming "Not in my back yard!" in regards to the evil terrorists, which when you think about it from their perspective is quite a reasonable thing to do. Are there any places here in the U.S. that would actually take and try the Gitmo detainees? (gotta love Newspeak... prisoners)

  | Are there any places here in the U.S.
  | that would actually take and try the
  | Gitmo detainees?

I imagine that they would be tried in Federal court, but I would be curious what the jurisdiction would be if the crimes were committed outside of the US.

Well I think he could put a bit more public pressure on them then. I really don't hear him bringing it up too often.

It's in his comments on every appropriations bill. You just don't care.

Let's all be honest: we don't think about Guantanamo. When people bring it up we'll hem and haw and say, "gee, that's just terrible," but we don't give a shit. Take it out of the spotlight and it may as well not exist.

Yep, that's exactly it. When this link popped up on HN, I read the article and though "wow, that's horrible. Something should be done here!". But tomorrow my mind will be full of other concerns, and a Yemenite I don't know who has been detained without charge or trial for 10 years on a military base far away by a government that is not mine is simply not on my radar.

Sad, and shameful, but true.

Yep. Most Americans have the attention span of a gnat. Plenty of us care, we just get distracted by other things. And that's the point really. The government wants us distracted. It's called Negative Liberty.

Most who read that article wil be outraged. They'll share it on FB. And forget it by Friday when the net big movie, sport event, or parade comes along.

That might have something to do with the fact that we have problems to deal here. The prisoners at Guantanamo might seem like a bigger deal if we did not have millions of prisoners who were never tried by a jury in the USA. We might actually care about this particular Obama campaign promise if there were not so many other broken promises.

dublinben:

Can you substantiate your claim that Congress is responsible for this?

Seems like Obama is the Commander in Chief and is the head of the Executive branch...

This section of the Wikipedia article does an excellent job of explaining President Obama's actions to close the detention camp, and how Congress interfered. They've made it impossible for the President to lawfully transfer the detainees to any US state or foreign country. There is realistically no way for the President to release them without being able to transfer them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guant%C3%A1namo_Bay_detention_...

For example: http://www.webcitation.org/5jPWyaCDq

In a major rebuke to President Barack Obama, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to block the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States and denied the administration the millions it sought to close the prison. The 90-6 Senate vote—paired with similar House action last week—was a clear sign to Obama that he faces a tough fight getting the Democratic-controlled Congress to agree with his plans to shut down the detention center and move the 240 detainees.

That's from 2009, but it's been an ongoing problem with defense funding bills since then.

It's more likely he's apathetic to the issue.

What was his solutions? Moving the detainees to another facility? Or did he actually want to give them trials and send the innocent ones home?

Move them to another facility on U.S. soil. And presumably hope the Supreme Court would then "force" his hand on moving them into the domestic judicial system. I will be snarky because it's late, and I'm annoyed this topic is on hn: President Obama loves nothing more than to vote "present".

No state will have them. Literally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com