May 15, 2009
Treating terrorists as criminals: There’s a mistake we shouldn’t be making, AGAIN!

Posted at 3:55 pm, in: War on Terrorism
Tags: Barack Obama, Gitmo

Obama is moving forward with the military commissions for those being detained at Gitmo, but he’s tweaking the rules a little bit to put the Barack Obama stamp on them:

President Barack Obama unveiled a new plan Friday to try some Guantanamo Bay war-on-terror detainees before military commissions — but under different rules from previous commissions instituted under President George W. Bush.

“These reforms will begin to restore the commissions as a legitimate forum for prosecution, while bringing them in line with the rule of law,” Obama said in a prepared statement. “This is the best way to protect our country, while upholding our deeply held values.”

Civil liberties groups already angry over some of Obama’s recent moves on detainee issues — such as his reversal Wednesday on releasing detainee-abuse photos — are strongly opposed to this move as well, which they describe as “reviving” the tribunals from the Bush-era.

“These military commissions are inherently illegitimate, unconstitutional and incapable of delivering outcomes we can trust. Tweaking the rules of these failed tribunals so that they provide ‘more due process’ is absurd; there is no such thing as ‘due process light,’ ” the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, said in a statement Friday.

As is to be expected from President Obama, who has been more worried about winning over the Muslim world than protecting America, his tweaking of the rules all give the suspected terrorists more latitude and generally favor their eventual release.

The ACLU’s quote shows that they have it wrong, again. Not that there’s any shocker there. These people aren’t American citizens and therefore should not be afforded any constitutional guarantees. They don’t have constitutional rights, therefore their constitutional rights can’t be violated.

It would seem to me we’re moving toward treating these detainees as possible everyday criminals, rather than the probable potential terrorists that they are. In other words, we are moving toward what is commonly referred to as a September 10, 2001 frame of mind, when we didn’t know what the terrorist were capable of.

I think most of know how this is going to go. Those who don’t learn from history are destined to repeat it. And, I’m not even sure this president is aware of a lot of history, never mind capable of learning from it, so I guess as a country we are destined to repeat it.