Sunday, May 17, 2009

Equal Time

I took off on President Obama recently for changing his mind about some pictures. (Life Hiker and J, I know both of you, you are good people.)

Mitch McConnell of the opposition seems to be pandering to what he hopes are our fears about the remaining Guantanamo prisoners. “I can’t imagine anyone wanting them in their community.”

Mr. McConnell makes a totally specious argument, and having typed that, I realized that I’m being charitable as there is no argument made so as to be specious.

There are 241 men at the prison in Cuba. All of them can fit, say fifty each at the Atlanta federal prison, a supermax or three, Pelican Bay, Leavenworth and so on. Does anyone really think they are going to escape?

Oh that Obama, he really needs to rethink that arbitrary deadline of the end of the year for closing the prison. We need to think this thing through. Think what through?

Leave the prisoners where they are or move them. As to their trials, which are the real issue, where they are held - there is no relevance.

And to move back to Obama, who is moving to the Bush Administration’s military court system for trying 20 (why 20?) detainees, with rules that apparently mirror a trial in a federal court, why the hell not try them in a federal court?

All y’all politicians are goofy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They've also said that some of the detainees will never get trials, they'll just keep them forever as "Prisoners of War."

My guess is they have twenty people whose cases are a slam-dunk, and those are the only ones who will get their day in court.

Ron Davison said...

The problem with politics is that it is like playing the market: it is not enough to simply make your own judgments, you have to make a judgment about what kind of judgments other people are going to make about your judgments. It gets convoluted very quickly.