Another lost hopeFollow

Bagram Airfield is illegal?

Hmm, I'm going to take a guess, and say that there is a good reason for this.



I would like you to tell us what you would do with enemy combatants after capture. Would you...keep them detained? Or would you give them a stern talking to? That base is the means of keeping dangerous people detained.

I support the idea of "The ends justify the means" when it comes to protecting American lives in war.

I guess this all boils down to what "wrong" is then.

Can you cite a promise Obama made regarding Bagram?

Gitmo is a unique case and the Supreme Court rulings on it have been based on the idea that Guantanamo is, for all intents and purposes, US soil due to its circumstance. The argument against Gitmo, from a legal standpoint, was that Bush was taking people from other nations and housing them on US soil while declaring that it didn't count as US soil with the protections that provides. Bagram, on the other hand, is on Afghan soil. My understanding is that there's not much argument that the prisoners there are protected by the US constitution and no one (from a legal perspective) was particularly surprised by the administration's statement.

If this is the case then there's no good reason to begin extending those protections and plenty of good reasons not to. This doesn't preclude, however, simple things such as ensuring that prisoners are treated humanely and revisiting the methods for them to challenge their detainment. I'd need more time & to see more done/not done to develop much more of an opinion than that. The stories I've read on it suggest that the White House statement was, likely in part, a stalling tactic while Obama decides exactly what he's going to do. Changing the rules to say "Everyone gets constitutional protection" before making that decision would be problematic.

Edited, Feb 21st 2009 11:43pm by Jophiel

Yeah. Obama hasn't turned our currency pink and started a national guard unit composed completely of cats yet, either. I mean, where's the change, right?There's organizations who want a lot of things. Most of them don't reflect what most citizens are looking for. Largely, yeah. That's what the Supreme Court decided, anyway.Well, the first and most obvious difference is that we haven't classified the folks in Gitmo as POWs which affects how we treat them. As for the second part, that's where I was going with my end remarks. The administration said that it would take them a few months at least to review all the regulations and decide how they were going to revise/reform the detainee system they were given when they took office. Due to a previous court case which was pending, Obama needed to make an immediate decision on Bagram. He (with the Justice Department) kept the previous stance unchanged for now. I'm not promising they'll change this, that or the other but it's probably smarter to keep the same legal stance and allow additional benefits to the prisoners (new tribunal system, etc) than to say they get full constitutional privileges and then have to take some away in the course of setting up the new rules.The prison can exist without beating people or setting guard dogs on them. The Obama administrations's stance on torture is certainly firmer than the Bush administration's. If the same reports come from Bagram now and Obama's reaction is the same as that before him, I'll be happy to ***** about it.

I'll admit that I'm giving Obama more benefit of the doubt than I gave Bush but that's not slightly in part because of what Bush was doing. Also, I realize that people who get picked up have to be put somewhere and never railed against the system in general but rather specific instances such as Gitmo and the actual abuses at Abu Ghraib. I hope to see a better method of deciding who should stay and who should go at Bagram and if nothing changes, I'll be disappointed but I'm not there yet.

Edited, Feb 22nd 2009 9:15am by Jophiel