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Sorry For the Detainment, Here's a Laptop
A select group of 17 Uighur Muslims held in Guantánamo, and waiting for a nation to grant them asylum are getting laptops and web training from the US military. Their web training will take place in a virtual computer lab the military has set up. The lessons will be limited to DVD language training as well as a basic users skill — set to help in any future employment options. Nury Turkel, an Uighur rights activist, said the training would help the men "be reintroduced into a modern society," adding that it "also would give hope to the men that their freedom is nearing." This special group already gets to order fast food and use a phone booth for weekly calls. I think the government is on to something here. Nothing keeps a man pacified like an occasional phone call, a cheeseburger, and surfing for a little porn.
These people are not considered terrorists. That's why they have to be released sooner rather than later.
They are currently being held because they can't go back to China, and they haven't yet found a place that can give them asylum.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I think a lot of people there are detained as POW. They are not terrorists, they simply lived in a country and were part of an army that the USA decided to invade.
Despite the judgment of your own court to release them...hmmm
What exactly makes them terrorists - being in Gitmo?
Do yourself a favor and never do anything - anything at all - that might make anybody suspicious, because you know just the suspicion is enough to make you actually guilty.
Let's see - shelter, fast food, phone access, and now computers. Yep, I'd say that makes their living conditions better than just about every homeless person in America. This must make the millions of recently unemployed Americans feel ever so special. Sorry to be cynical, and I have virtually no idea if these guys actually pose a real threat or not, but am I the only one that thinks prisoners should be put to work to offset some of that tax money being wasted on keeping them alive?
Actually, there is only one thing to be done with these people: take them into the USA, compensate them for their wrongful imprisonment, and finally allow them the chance to live a life of freedom. In other words, ATONE for what you did to them.
Any upstanding American should be ashamed of what his or her country has done and still is doing to these men. Let all the NIMBYs fuck off, too - if I lived in the USA, I'd gladly have these people in my neighbourhood, and I'd show them what America is REALLY like. I'd show them friendliness, hospitality, tolerance and helpfulness, and I'm sure that this would not only be the right thing to do but also the best way of making sure that these folks will come to regard America as their friend in the end.
or let them go.
And in what country do you propose to deposit them?
The United States of America, of course.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"Coalition military intelligence officials estimated that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained in Iraq since the war began last year 'had been arrested by mistake
The calculation in my .sig is based on the assumption that error rates amongst the detainees are no greater than those made by American police officers who shoot the wrong person when discharging a weapon after arriving at the scene of an altercation. That left-wing America-hating organization, the NRA, has done research to document that the cops shoot the wrong person about 10% of the time, as opposed to Real Americans, who shoot the wrong person about 2% of the time.
Of course, given the "fog of war" and the incentives to use non-judicial detainment as a way of getting back at your enemies, the probable fraction of innocents in Guantanamo is much higher. And to the anonymous coward who claims below that we can't infer anything about the fraction of innocents in Guantanamo Bay based on the astonishingly high fraction of innocent detainees in Afghanistan: what are the judicial procedures employed by American forces to ensure guilt prior to incarceration in Guantanamo?
Many centuries of blood-soaked history have taught us that a public and speedy trial by a judge who is applying more-or-less clearly defined laws is the only thing that is remotely likely to protect the innocent accused from zealous cowards who would otherwise see them punished without trial. No one who is in touch with reality at all can think that there are not many innocents in Guantanamo Bay, and anyone who loves America and the principles for which it once stood should be clamouring to have everyone either tried in public in the normal American system of courts, or released.
Advocating anything else is evidence of a profound hatred for everything that once made America a great and admirable republic.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Okay, but my point is that ad hoc, extralegal "justice" erodes the actual justice system. The entire government justification for Guantanamo undermines confidence in the judiciary and places more unconstitutional power in the hands of the executive. These things have far-reaching, currently under-appreciated consequences.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
There is not a real problem here. I'm a former refugee (along with my family), lived with tortured persons, and families of political prisoners and know there are international laws and conventions that define what to do when you have people not welcomed in their own country. This false problem is because the US don't have the political will to apply those conventions after the mess they have created.
These ARE FUCKING TERRORISTS what don't you get?
These people have not been convicted of anything; many of them were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Would you want them driving your taxi cab? Flipping your burgers? Digging up your main sewer line?
Why wouldn't I?
You fucking bleading heart liberal socialists need a quick lesson in The World in the 21st Century. It is US against them.
"F*cking fascists" (to use your own words) like you need a quick lesson of The World in the 20th Century, because attitudes like yours brought us two world wars and genocide.
On the other hand, Islamic terrorism is insignificant; for all its fireworks, 9/11 simply wasn't a significant contributor to mortality in the US even in 2001. People (like you) who try to create irrational fear because of 9/11 are helping the terrorists, both by destroying our liberties and by ascribing more power to terrorists than they actually have.
The US will not win the war on terrorism by force or jailing people. The only way we can win is through justice and compassion.
Just because the Military chose not to prosecute does not mean these were sweet villagers minding their shops and tending their gardens when "inaccurately" picked up.
They were caught with weapons in hand in combat or with large weapon caches.
Not really.
In the wake of 9-11, the approach taken was that if it wasn't clear sure whether somebody was a terrorist or not, it was prudent to detain them and try to figure it out the details later.
I can understand this attitude-- it's the "better safe than sorry" approach. It's not the way we do things in the US normally ("I'm not sure if this guy is a criminal or not, so let's arrest him until we can figure it out" wouldn't be allowed by any police force in America), but I can't say that I don't understand the reasoning.
But the consequences of that way of operating is that many, or possibly most, of the people picked up actually aren't terrrorists.
(and the downside of that is that, although they may not have been terrorists before they were detained, five years in Gitmo may very well have changed their attitudes... so "better safe than sorry" may actually make us unsafe, and definitely sorry.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
They were caught with weapons in hand
How surprising is it to find Afghani males with weapons?
or with large weapon caches.
Again, how unusual would that be in a tribal country that has had no effective national government since the early 1980s?
Hell, if the USA were somehow occupied, the same could be said of many USAsian households (in the south particularly).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Pot, kettle.
A lot of the people in gitmo are there because we paid some tribal lord a bunch of money for 'taliban soldiers' and they rounded up whomever they didn't like. So yes, Jamal the goatherder is not a terrorist.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
What would you do if some bunch of foreigners rolled into your country and started acting like occupiers? That's right, you'd shoot them.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Ever hear of refugees? Is it strange that persecuted people from a brutal dictatorship would head to a country that practices their religion?
No, they were turned in by people who claimed they had weapons or who claimed that they were terrorists. If you started handing out cash in South Central L.A. for "known criminals," and you had no way to check their record, what do you think is going to happen?
Tribes turn in other tribes, just as in the slave trade days. It's one of the reasons a nation cannot dominate that region of the mideast - because they are not nationalists. Tribe and religion will always trump whatever flag is planted in the capital.
In actuality, these men were found on the battlefield participating in attacks on the US,
If someone invaded my country, I'd be on the battlefield participating in attacks against whoever it was. Its like saying the French Resistance in WWII was a terrorist organization, and was generally unlawful. The only time your allowed to fight an invading military force is if the invaders recognize your legitimacy.
I'm not sure of the reason every singe detainee is there, but I have heard that there was some amount of them who were "enemy combatants", which is a different thing than a terrorist. An "enemy combatant" is a POW who is not subject to the Geneva Convention because they are called "enemy combatants".
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Eight years of illegal imprisonment and, so far the get to use laptops but likely not to keep them and free access to junk food, damn those must be some pretty pricey computers and some really good junk food. Just give them free access to civil suit lawyers and a couple of years to make use of them. Once they are millionaires there will be plenty of countries who want to take them ;).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Were they proven guilty? No? Then they're innocent.