Quote:

Chant said:
pardon me for saying it...

but you call guantanamo (or however the hell you spell it) humane?

it isn't until recently that they've begun releasing POW's incarcerated there.

These people had been denied their rights for so long that it can hardly be called "right"



I answered all these points in another topic already, Chant

    Newsweek lied, people died ?
    HERE



It's very frustrating for me to see how distortedly this U.S. military action is portrayed in the U.S. by a Bush-hating liberal media, and even more so outside the United States.


Here's a PBS story detailing the facts concerning Guantanamo Bay, giving a very balanced detailing of both perspectives, from June 15th, when all this frenzy kicked up again recently:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june05/gitmo_6-15.html


With some talking points from the story and panel discussion:


    BRIG. GEN. THOMAS HEMINGWAY: The rules of evidence and procedure established for trials by military commission compare favorably to those being used in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. These rules are consistent with our national commitment to adhere to the rule of law.

    BRIG. GEN. THOMAS HEMINGWAY: ... the primary reason that we hold people is to get them off the battlefield, and secondarily to gain intelligence.

    SEN. JON KYL: They're not in a legal limbo any more than any other prisoners in any other war were in limbo when they were captured.
    The concept here of capturing people on the battlefield is to get them in a position where they can't cause you anymore harm.
    And, secondly, for those who can give you good intelligence information, obtain that information, too, to prevent further harm to your troops or to civilians in the case of terrorists.
    That's the purpose for detaining these prisoners, these combatants who were shooting at our troops. Now, there are some who believe that they should be tried. Tried for what? You don't try prisoners of war. You hold them until the conflict is over with. There are some who have been accused of war crimes or who will be accused of war crimes. They will receive trials through military commissions that have been set up and the rules of procedure for those have been described. And they are complete and thorough.
    And I don't know of anybody who is suggesting here this evening that those rules are not appropriate.

    SEN. JON KYL: What's happened is that the U.S. Supreme Court has said that because Guantanamo is under U.S. control, some rules relating to U.S. procedures apply, including habeas corpus, which means that the people have a right to have their status reviewed.
    And after that ruling, the status of every one of these detainees was reviewed. Some of them were released as a result of that review.
    But the kind of people who remain held are terrorist trainers, bomb makers, extremist recruiters and financers, bodyguards of Osama bin Laden, would-be suicide bombers, folks like this.
    They're the ones that continue to be held -- not in limbo as if they have some right to a determination and a trial by jury or something, but being held until this conflict over with so they don't cause any more harm.

    Just bear a couple other things in mind here to put it in perspective. The idea here is to try to separate out those who need to be held from those who could be released. Well, we released a bunch of them and guess what? Twelve of them, at least that we picked up subsequently, went right back to fighting us again.
    And, again, the point of keeping prisoners during a conflict is so that they don't go back and hurt your people again.
    And the war on terror, it is true; they don't all come from Afghanistan. They come from a lot of places in the world and you don't know where they are going to strike.

    SEN. JON KYL: Well, sure. That's been the case with every war. You wait until the war is over to release the prisoners.
    This isn't sport fishing, you know, catch and release. This is serious business. What would you charge them with -- that they were fighting us and that they might fight us again and you're going to go back and find somebody that was in Afghanistan, this guy, and have him come testify that yeah, if he were released, he would probably fight again -- in no conflict ever -- just take World War II, for example, did we ever try anybody. We never charged the German POWs and tried them; we simply held them until the end of the war was over. And that's the same thing here.









  • from Do Racists have lower IQ's...

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