By Tina Grazier
Much ado was made of the Bush administration’s policy of detaining “enemy combatants” at the Guantanamo facility without due process. Nearly one year after the election of Barack Obama not much has changed. Guantanamo is still open and we’re still hoping that other countries will take some of these men off our hands but we’re not having much luck. But the president has a new plan (doesn’t he always) to move some of the detainees to an Illinois prison. What’s interesting is that only a few of these prisoners will be tried in civilian courts. Others will receive Military trials and still others will continue to be held without charges and without trial. Obama has dubbed these characters the “law of war” detainees. As Tom Parker of Amnesty International put it,
“The only thing that President Obama is doing with this announcement is changing the ZIP code of Guantnamo.”
You can read all about this ridiculous sham in the New York Times article, “Obama Tells Prison to Take Detainees,” by Helene Copper and David Johnston.
I’d like all of you Bush bashers to explain how this pretense of Constitutional rights being granted to a few detainees, and not others, is sufficient in terms of the law as you see it. That was the point, wasn’t it? To show the world that we Americans have higher standards and that they are universal?