Yesterday Barack Obama suspended the GWOT military tribunals and announced the closing of Guantanamo Prison Camp, eventually. Care to explain to those still being detained without charges, why it’s going to take a year?
Many progressives are applauding Obama’s bold moves, and today Obama proclaimed that the US does not torture. Are the Gitmo prisoners still maintaining a hunger strike? Are their jailers responding by feeding them against their will, using gastric tubes? That’s torture. If Obama hesitates to roll back the policies which sustained Guantanamo, the responsibility is going to be his own.
What’s worse, they aren’t so much “closing” it, as relocating the prisoners elsewhere. Same thing, just hidden because it will be distributed around the world and harder to identify.
This reality is being duly noted by the more alert elements of the world population, which includes few enough Americans, I might add. Nothing that Obama is doing here really is an end to anything.
What he is doing actually leaves in place the misclassification of POWs captured by the US military as supposedly not being POWs, when in fact they are. This is the reactionary policy of the Dubya Klan, is it not, and is merely a mechanism to avoid giving POWs their rights under International Law (no longer respected by the united Nations or anybody) as POWs to be treated without being abused and tortured. In other words, Obama is so far leaving in all the pseudo legal mumbo-jumbo that the Cheney torture gang put into place to deny many innocent people all their legal rights as US military captured POWs in US occupied countries.