BS on Gitmo

'Obama to act early on Guantanamo

Barack Obama will issue an executive order within days of entering the White House to close the Guantanamo detention centre, senior advisers have confirmed.'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7825902.stm

But whats this?

'...experts say it is likely to take many months, perhaps as long as a year, to empty the prison that has drawn international criticism since it received its first prisoners seven years ago this week. One transition official said the new administration expected that it would take several months to transfer some of the remaining 248 prisoners to other countries, decide how to try suspects and deal with the many other legal challenges posed by closing the camp.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/us/politics/13gitmo.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

A week is a long time in politics. A year is... longer. I'm going to make a prediction. In a year, Gitmo will still be open, and all the lefty wankers who have been screeching about it for the last six years will have triangulated their positions. Because St Obama will be in charge, Gitmo will become strangely benign, a holding pen rather than a torturers hide-away. The cushyness of the place will be revealed lovingly by the New York Times and Washington Post, including the haute cuisine food and the free korans.

Gitmo is a symbol- a symbol of the deranged response the left took to the events set in motion by 9/11, and Americas fight-back against a determined foe. Apparently, America is not allowed to fight its enemies, and if it does, it has to keep to an enormous set of rules dictated to it by the ACLU, the Council for American-Islamic Relations and the bien-pensants of San Francisco. If men in t-shirts and jeans attack it, hiding behind the locals and attacking mostly civilian targets, we are to treat them... well, how are we to treat them? According to the Geneva Convention, they have broken the laws of War and are therefore not protected by the convention. In normal wars, they would be shot or hung.

Instead, America invented Gitmo. Vile criminal terrorists are held there for indefinite periods, quizzed and shaken up with psych warfare techniques, and eventually released with no charges. They are so so lucky. Many of them wander back to the battlefields of south Asia to resume their disgusting deeds.

The people who should be angry, in a world that made sense, would be the people whose relatives are murdered by these Gitmo inmates. Especially the ones whose precious family members died at the hands of released Gitmo inmates.

Mr Obama has committed himself to really fighting the war in Afghanistan. Good. But what will he do with the inevitable surge of individuals caught on the battlefield out of uniform, hiding their weapons, using civilians as cover? Take them all back to the US to be tried? Shoot them on the battlefield, as combatant nations have done in every previous conflict? Or has he got some humane method of incarceration and punishment yet to be revealed?

If he comes up with something more humane than Gitmo, I'll eat my Biro.