If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
In his years in office, Obama has retreated from the moral argument against Guantánamo. If he is serious about closing the prison and not repeating the errors of the past, then he should reclaim that moral high ground.
The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was never a good idea. It is an even worse idea now. Let's start the process to close GTMO now.
Other documentarians may be more famous than Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, but there's no one working right now who afflicts the comfortable with more energy and pointedness than Gibney.
The average detainee at Guantánamo has been held there for over nine years. Nine years ago Barack Obama was serving his first term as Chair of the Health and Human Services Committee in the Illinois Senate.
Security is a real need, of course, but know-nothing security flouts that need, often enough both ignoring and aggravating the real dangers we face while, at the same time, inflicting massive inconvenience on people innocently caught in its web.
We have not repented of the torture that we facilitated after 1993 and implemented after 2001. Because we have not repented, we are all the more at risk of doing the exact same thing under new conditions or a new president.
Right now, the Jewish community is finishing up its annual marking of days, as each night we count the Omer, the 49 days between the second night of Passover and the beginning of Shavuot. Immediately after, we'll mark another set of days, one with only despair and no celebration.
If President Obama is concerned about his legacy, closing Guantanamo should be at the top of his list. President Bush created this mess, but it has fallen to Obama to fix it. Sometimes a leader has to ignore the polls and simply do what is right.
Our country's founding principles of habeus corpus were in a direct response to the "lock them away in the Tower" abuses in Britain. We were going to be different. Oh, I know Guantanamo isn't on American soil, but our flag flies over that prison -- the same one we pledge "liberty and justice for all" to.
Here in the 21st century, we need to relearn those lessons and focus on training our children to be instruments of peace, not oppression.
We need enemies. Homeland Security is psychological. Thus the guilt or innocence of the Gitmo prisoners and all our other detainees is irrelevant.
The hunger strikers have succeeded in pushing Guantanamo out of the netherworld of non-news and onto front pages, into presidential news conferences, and to the top of the TV newscasts. But what exactly do those prisoners, many now being force-fed, want to highlight?
The case of "Spin Ghul" was perhaps the first time a criminal defendant in a U.S. court begged a federal judge to send him to Guantanamo. While unusual, it wasn't all that surprising.
Fixing Guantanamo -- which is what Obama clearly wants --- will require him to take risky unilateral action and dedicate a great deal of political capital.
Committing atrocities is one thing, but institutionalizing them with the full imprimatur of the US government is another, and a more definitive way to ensure Bin Laden enjoys a posthumous victory.
Muslim antagonism towards the United States would not have awakened if we had refrained from material military, economic, or diplomatic assistance in favor of oppressive Muslim regimes.
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