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Donald Trump has signed an executive order to keep the Guantánamo Bay prison camp open, reversing the policy of the Obama administration.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, Trump said he had directed the defence secretary, James Mattis, "to re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay". He added that he expected that "in many cases" captured terrorists would be sent to the camp.
The Trump executive order instructs Mattis, in consultation with the secretary of state and other officials, to deliver a new policy on battlefield detentions, "including policies governing transfer of individuals to US Naval Station Guantánamo Bay" within 90 days.
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Donald Trump Signs Executive Order to Keep Guantánamo Bay Open
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Life is to you a dashing and bold adventure.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:51AM (12 children)
Imprisonment with no legal recourse continues. Are those people criminals? Military prisoners? Oh, right, they are carefully defined to fall outside of all possible categories, so the US can do whatever it damned well pleases. This would be impossible on US territory, or in the territory of any Western nation...
I do object to claiming this as a reversal of Obama's policy. Obama had eight long years to end this travesty, and failed to do so (despite it being one of his campaign promises).
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:17AM
Well, if you consider that terror works better for those who already have power, and that getting jailed as mere suspect, tortured and then released probably makes you hating your captors, you may just consider Guantanamo as a terrorist factory and have everything fit.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:10AM (4 children)
There are three little words my predecessor refused to say: unlawful enemy combatants. We must be clear, terrorists -- wherever we find them -- are not merely criminals. Obama was very soft on terrorism. When terrorists bombed hospitals in Yemen, his State Department put out a statement of condemnation. Like a model makes a fashion statement with a sash or a purse. Somebody got condemned. Nobody got condemned. Because nobody got annihilated. We're going to start annihilating, believe me. We have no choice but to annihilate them. And bring them to Gitmo. It's going to be beautiful. Give a big thank you to General Mattis, folks.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:21AM (3 children)
From the bottom of the SN page -
"They make a desert and call it peace." -- Tacitus (55?-120?)
Go ahead, Donald - burn down the rain forests, salt the ground, bomb the cities - make the earth one huge desert. When there is no one left to argue with, you can call it peaceful. Tacitus could have been talking specifically about the US military industrial complex.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday February 01 2018, @11:54AM (2 children)
Those quotations are so interesting. You signed your tweet, you said let's cage Aristarchus. Gitmo is a big, beautiful cage. On a tropical island in the Caribbean. My predecessor said he couldn't close Gitmo, because it would cost too much money to close it. So he kept it open. He said he would close it, he kept it open -- that was a very smart move. Because it's ready for us to fill it up with our many enemies. What about federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people? Our FBI is a mess. But there's lots of space in Gitmo.
As everybody knows, we've been having big problems with China and Russia. General Mattis says they can get together and try to bully us. He thinks maybe the two of them, together, maybe could beat us. We must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so strong and so powerful -- much more powerful than it is now -- that it will deter any acts of aggression by any other nation or anyone else. Or all of them together. Perhaps someday in the future there will be a magical moment when the countries of the world will get together to eliminate their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, we are not there yet, sadly. We're not having that magical moment with the fairy dust. So let's have an American moment instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:52PM
I got to tell you man, you could be his speech writer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @10:15PM
Seems to me it will be a perfect place to send you once you get impeached, indicted and convicted.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:08PM (4 children)
Are you saying Obama didn't try? The home countries of the detainees wouldn't take them back. He tried to move them into high security detention facilities in the US, but the Republican Congress wouldn't let him (you know, he was being soft on crime and all). There is even an empty maximum security facility in Colorado, and they were lobbying to have them sent there, but Congress refused. And somehow this is all his fault?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Thursday February 01 2018, @05:27PM (2 children)
One thing that stands out to me is this: These congress-critters generally hold themselves up as penultimate examples of hyper-patriotism. It seems a lot more like jingoism to me, but those so inclined can just call it patriotism if it suits them. It's still pretty damned hyper. These congress-critters loudly and regularly claim the US is the best, and our way of life is the best, and are literally directly responsible for our legal system, which they also claim is the best.
But our way of life, specifically our legal system, isn't, according to them, good enough to deal with the acts of these people. Their (imaginary) God forbid that these people have access to lawyers, trials, juries. They have to be kept offshore, on another country's territory, where they have no options to defend against false accusations or otherwise cope whatsoever.
I am constantly reminded by this (and other things) that the pervading attitude in congress is that the US legal system is only to be used when they find it convenient.
First they came for...
Yeah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 02 2018, @01:27AM (1 child)
That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
pen != arch|uber|hyper
http://www.google.com/search?q=penultimate [google.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday February 02 2018, @05:32AM
Penultimate in that context meant exactly what I intended it to mean; next to last on the list of invalid patriotic archetypes, higher only than their (imaginary) "God." They imagine they are placing themselves as the highest authorities; but are actually placing themselves at the lowest possible place – right next to a poorly put together superstition.
But thanks for playing. Always fun to bandy actual words around. You almost caught what I was saying, too, which is laudable. :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 01 2018, @08:40PM
At one point, the Democrats had a super majority, so there are no excuses.
All his fault? No. This is the fault of countless politicians in our country, including Obama. He put up a feeble resistance at best, in order to make himself look good. Suckers fall for that every time.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday February 02 2018, @03:31AM
In Obama's defense:
1. His administration did manage to release a large percentage of the prisoners there. The population went from something like 500 to less than 100.
2. A lot of those who are still there were refused re-entry by their home countries. Yemen in particular is guilty of this, accounting for something like 4/5 of the prisoners still stuck in Gitmo, although part of the problem is that they're in a civil war and the government that the US recognizes is losing that fight badly.
3. The Republicans in Congress tried everything they could to stop him, such as defunding the office in the State Department that was trying to get them out.
It wasn't all roses, though: Another part of Obama's plan, which Republicans refused, was to build a super-secure prison back in the US mainland and move the really dangerous guys there, but still never give them a trial. That's an obvious 5th Amendment problem ("No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law", and notice that it doesn't say "No citizen" but "No person").
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.