Quote Originally Posted by daihashi
. . . .The people at GITMO do not deserve American rights. They obviously need some process there, but giving them American rights is not the way to go about it.

Like someone else said earlier.. maybe something similar to being a POW or the like, but having equal rights to an American who pays his dues to his country through taxes or through serving is just insane!!! These people have contributed nothing to America and you want to give away our rights to them? :wtf:
Yes, I'm saying we need to afford them the similar judicial rights. That's precisely what I'm saying.

As nonsensical as that may seem to some who cannot see past the hang-'em-high approach, it's not. Affording Gitmo's so-called enemy combatants the same due process Americans receive is the only logical approach we can take when we've spent all this time and money to inflict our American freedoms and democracy on their part of the world. If Bush and his cronies hadn't talked such a big game all this time and spent hours justifying the war(s) in the Middle East on the grounds that we're fighting the good fight to spread freedom and democracy, then this would be a totally different matter.

We've been talking the freedom-and-democracy talk now for years, however--and insisting, after the greatly embarrassing Abu Graib situation, for instance--that we must be exemplary in treating their prisoners in our U.S.-overseen Iraqi military jails with humanity and respect and due process. That being the case, then we damn well better set the example--just like we agreed to do under the Geneva conventions in our approach to torture and insistence that Americans not be tortured as war criminals in other parts of the world--and lead the way as examples of the freedom, democracy, and due process when we're holding alleged criminals or combatants in our jails.

We need to look, too, to what I mentioned earlier, which is the huge effort we're making to implement American-style judicial processes in both Iraq and Afghanistan through our provincial reconstruction efforts. Your tax dollars are doing that work this very minute and will be for many decades to come. If we're going to bring those parts of the world and their people out of the dark ages, then we need to lead the way with our exemplary treatment of their citizens in our detention facilities.

It's worth reminding everyone here that you first have to understand the basic differences between alleged criminals and convicted ones.

What I want to know is what makes you hang-'em-high/waterboard-'em-deep types think that we have possibly been 100% accurate in identifying and jailing only guilty combatants at Guantanamo. Because we say so? Well, that's a laugh a minute. We said we were going into Iraq on the basis of WMDs and we'd only be there for a year or 18 months. Then we said mission accomplished. Ooops! Then we said we weren't inciting further ire in that part of the world and weren't stirring up terrorists, but you've seen how accurate we were in our claim there by how subdued Al Qaeda in Iraq has been (to be read as sarcastic). Ooops! Then we said we could withdraw troops and begin a draw down. Then we had to about-face on that and do a surge instead. Had to replace the top guy at Defense along the way. Ooops! We promised adherence to the Geneva conventions and insisted that Americans not be tortured, yet we had those troubling photographs at Abu Graib and the convictions of those amazing American soldier-humanitarians (again, to be read sarcastically) who were their jailers. Ooops! I'm sorry, but if you're really so gullible as to think that our intelligence has been so infallible as to only result in the detention of 100% guilty parties at Gitmo, then I have some swamp land for sale in Florida.

If we hadn't made all the claims about spreading freedom and democracy and if we weren't working so hard to instill our justice freedoms in the Middle East, then judicial due process to the Gitmo detainees wouldn't be such an issue at all. I daresay there are probably plenty of real dangerous terrorist creeps in detention at Gitmo who don't deserve due process, but since we've been pretending with great piety for these years to be the arbiters of goodness and freedom and democracy in the world, then we pretty much have to give it to them so we can avoid the allegation of hypocrisy on this topic (even if we can't avoid it on many many others).

Here's some homework. No one will do it, but it'd still be worth your while:

1. Read about Iraqi and Afghanistan reconstruction efforts. There are provincial reconstruction teams and embedded provincial reconstruction teams. It's the ePRTs who're doing most of the legwork on justice, under the auspices of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Use Google to do this.
2. Familiarize yourselves with the third and fourth Geneva conventions. Then read the first and second after that. Good agreements, those.