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Families of firefighters killed in the 9/11 attacks are looking to obtain a meeting with President Obama to discuss his decision to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Obama announced on Thursday that Gitmo would be closed for 120 days while officials review the prison known for its harsh interrogation methods. Civil Rights lawyer Norman Siegel says that the families are looking for "open and fair, but speedy trials for the prisoners who are being held there." Obama may be in store for an an earful if family members share the sentiments of Michael Burke, whose brother was a fire captain who died in the attacks and writes an op-ed for today's Daily News. He argues that it is impossible to fight terrorism under the Constitution, which would could become a "means to our destruction." He also says that Obama "is convincing these mass murderers that we are too narcissistic, too foolish and too weak to protect and defend ourselves."
9/11 Families Want to Discuss Gitmo Closing with Obama
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I feel for their loss, but won't they please shut up now? We have nothing built where the WTC once stood in part because the 9/11 families have an almost veto-power over every decision. Why on earth should they get a meeting with the President? What makes them experts on national security or Constitutional law? And shame on you, Michael Burke, for your Op-Ed advocating gutting the Constitution. Doing so will only drag us down to the levels at which these people who hold such hatred for us operate while at the same time destroying the very values on which this country was founded.
Thank you ! I agree 100%
100% agreed as well.
Agreed. I'm sorry but the last thing we need right now is the personal-emotion driven opinion of the 9/11 families. I feel for thier tragic loss but it is for that exact reason that thier opinion on the matter will obviously be leaning towards anger & revenge.
This prison is a scar on our face to the world and it must be dealt with. Allowing torture & the ignorance of the constitution just makes us exactly what we are supposed to be fighting against. People who think otherwise make me sick.
Additionally, Michael Burke is assuming the people being held at Gitmo are actually guilty, but it's becoming apparent that what filesthe Obama adminstration can find on these people, they have no case and are probably innocent.
The obnoxiousness and self-obsessed grief of these 9/11 families has no end.
No, even the most horrific acts by enemies don't condone torture on our part. That's completely against the ideals of this country. There are other ways to get information, including creating an intelligence community that doesn't operate like rag-tag operation on a budget.
We need to prove we're smarter and more determined, not more ruthless and vengeful.
Didn't read Burke's op-ed, but at least he acknowledges that we're talking about following the Constitution or not. I think there's an obvious answer to that, but I appreciate his framing it in an accurate way.
all that opinion, and you didn't read it?
i envy your powers, sir.
Yeah, that's not a fair reading of my post. I have done more than enough reading about the Constitution and was using the quote as a jumping off point for discussion (about the constitutional issue, not about the op-ed itself). Thanks, Good Charlotte :) :) :)
yeah seriously, the same families that think they have the right to go down into a construction site just because theyve done it every year since the towers fell - As if where someone dies should be accesible forever or something.
Mostly it's the white trash firefighter families. Sorry!
Completely unrelated. And classy job bringing racist rhetoric into the conversation.
I fully agree that some of the victims' families have been over the top with some of their requests re: Ground Zero, but the argument questioning the closing Guantanamo is a reasonable one held by millions of people around the country.
Once again, equating Guantanamo with torture is completely inaccurate. Of the hundreds of detainees, THREE (3) were waterboarded, which might be an awful practice, but compared to the torture used by authorities in their home countries, where limbs and spines are fractured or amputated, I'd say it's pretty civil. Everything in the globalized world is relative.
It is also quite civil compared to the option of burning to death or jumping from the 105th floor of WTC 1.
The guys who were waterboarded were not run of the mill foot soldiers with questionable intel...they were the worst of the worst, men who sat in a room with Osama Bin Laden himself and planned attacks that burned and crushed thousands of innocent Americans alive.
how the fuck is white trash racist, you're an idiot
If I called some random person "black trash" you know damn most people reading it would be offended. As a white person, I am offended when I hear the term "white trash," even when uttered by a white person. If you mean to imply these people are trailer trash or rednecks, please be more specific.
That said, even though some of their actions have been over the top, it's out of line to call the parents and children of 9/11 victims any names.
Agreed. White trash is racist, classist and, in fact, stems from an archaic 1930's era notion of "black trash". It's a hugely offensive term and has unfortunately found its way into the popular lexicon.
The correct way to close Gitmo is to put all the prisoners on a single plane, then fly the pane into the water.
There's only three reasons people are there:
1- they haven't cracked yet
2- they're still giving useful information
3- even though they're guilty there's no way to factually prove it without using valuable info as evidence
Just because we have a liberal democrat in office does not mean cease to be hard on those who deserve it.
Please read the Op-Ed. This man is an idiot.
Most of the people sent to Gitmo were released. Some were innocent guys turned over to us for the bounty paid. Even the guilty ones must mostly consist of low-level soldiers.
However, we still don't know WHY Gitmo exists. The last administration sometimes said it was to hold criminals for trial and other days said they were POWs (That implied if the War On Terror ended, they go home, like any other POW). And then there's the dark reality: It was a black hole so Bush could do whatever Bush wanted outside of any law.
One thing is certain: It's not worth the damage to our country by keeping it open. I don't believe 9/11 families can possibly take this into account.
One of the first things our new President does is extend the rights of the enemies of our country? As someone who lost a loved one on 9/11, I find this choice disgusting and completely offensive.
Obama's choice of putting politics ahead of security, is leaving himself open for failure. How can we not blame the Obama administration if (when?) a released terrorist kills Americans? Remember Obama, it's your watch now...
Don't use your loss as a crutch. Your opinion is not more valid because you qualified your statement as coming from "someone who lost a loved one on 9/11."
AS someone who also lost a loved one and is imminently going to lose another loved one due to the after effects of being on the pile, I'm going to use my qualified voice to say shut up once and for all to all the people who are, as ianmac47 rightly pointed out, using this as a crutch. Those people in Gitmo aren't directly connected to the WTC. We all know who did it. We all know you only want revenge on anyone you can take y our loss out on. There are some of us who are sick of being caught up in your pity party and would like to move on. For those of us who lost someone, you are making it impossible to let the wound heal. And for those of us who are in the process of saying goodbye to someone still you are cheapening the remaining time they have on this earth. Take your complaints elsewhere! We don't care anymore!
Yeah, as Stephen Colbert said, "What business does the Constitution have telling the president what he can and can't do?"
AngryGod is exactly right. Gitmo's express purpose was that Bush/Cheney/Woo & Co. thought they had found some magic loophole in United States law, where they could do whatever they want, to whomever they want, for as long as they want. A literally lawless zone, where they could practice medieval torture.
Does Mr. Burke realize that Pres. Bush originaly asserted the right to declare even him, an American citizen, on American soil, an "enemy combatant", and dump him there, without any kind of recourse?
The United States put on trial both Japanese commanders, and Confederate soldiers who mistreated their charges.
The Brits, who suffered WTC-type casualties every night for a year, when bombed during WWII, didn't torture their prisoners.
Lastly, torture was designed not to elicit true confessions, just confessions. People who are professional interrogators will tell you that it is not effective.
Try these people (made harder because of Bush's actions), hold them as p.o.w.'s, but Gitmo has become the #1 recruitment poster for Al Queda and has damaged our reputation all over the world. We can't take it back, but we can stop it.
The ultimate irony is that we may not be able to convict some of the terrorists at Gitmo because their confessions were made under torture and thus are not admissible (or reliable).
The acts committed by terrorists are horrendous, but if we meet barbarism with barbarism, how much better than the terrorists are we? As John Adams said, we are a nation of laws and not of men. This country was founded on the Constitution and to throw that away now would mean that the terrorists win in that they have ruined the very foundation of our nation.
Sing Sing or Gitmo. If I were a terrorist caught in a theatre of war, I would rather be tortured at Gitmo than ass-raped by Big Daddy at Sing Sing or any other federal prison.
Michael Burke - shut the fuck up. You are not the only person in the world who has lost a loved one, yet you somehow think that it's OK for you to call for thhe constitution to be abolished? Just shut up.
you know that mr burke voted for mccain and is still salty over the fact that obama won.
There's nothing like a reactionary family member linked to an over-politicized news story to bring the US into Nazi-like torture practices.
Who were they whining at when we needed the US to be less dependent on middle-eastern oil so we can close military bases in nut-case-holy-land-central and get al-Qaeda off our backs? Oh I forgot, the bereaved only want to create *more* death and depravity. I must have forgotten that when my dad died; I missed the chance to stab a baby or something.
#21- Nazi-like? Really?
Didn't know we were into gassing folks or putting them in ovens in Gitmo.
Thanks for the heads up, though.
Edge,
Not Nazi-like. The same as the Nazis.
Forcing people to stand up for hours, deprived of sleep is torture (check out the movie "Stalag 17").
Waterboarding is torture.
In fact, the term "enhanced interrogation techniques" is a translation of the german "Verschärfte Vernehmung" - a term invented by the Gestapo. (the memo is at the link below).
Quite a few Nazis were hanged or sentenced to long prison terms for doing these things.
Speaking of "Stalag 17", which is one of my favorite movies, I now get ashamed watching the scene where the British flyer is forced to stand for hours on end by the POW camp commander.
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html
And here is a sound clip of John Yoo, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel, stating the president of the United States has the authority to crush the testicles of the child of a detainee, if the president "thinks he needs to do that".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt1-eWU2Ii0
Are you jaded against America so much that you really think the President (any President) would order a child's balls to be crushed just because he could? Just because a college professor asked a shocking question does not mean there's ever been a Presidential conversation about doing such a thing.
Today New York is still standing and the United States has not experienced an attack in 7 1/2 years. There is no way to prove that intelligence gained at Guantanamo had any hand in making that happen, but chances are it did.
I didn't think any U.S. President would defy the Geneva convention, but there you go.
And "chances are that it did?" Are you really formulating an opinion about something as significant as the torture of suspects on the basis of a rationale for which you have no proof?
It's not that the president is gonna say "crush that kids balls" it's the fact that his administration has authorized such behavior so that anyone down on the totem pole thinks they have highest level approval to do so. And no, I doubt, though it's possible, that anyone from our great and virtuous land would "would order a child's balls to be crushed just because he could?" That's a straw man argument. No, in the torturers mind he would be thinking that he was doing it for a higher purpose. Thats the tortured logic. Do some more research- this book for one:
How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq
Also, by your tortured logic the fact that Clinton kept us safe after the 1st trade center bombing without torture then that means that we don't need torture, right?
>Are you jaded against America so much that you really >think the President (any President) would order a >child's balls to be crushed just because he could?
So you want the protection against that happening to be that the president is a nice guy?
Hey - why have the Magna Carta - King John is a nice guy. Why have a Bill of Rights, why have a Constitution? We should just trust the government to do the right thing -they'd never arrest someone unless they were guilty, right?
So I guess people like Madison, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and the rest of the Founding Fathers were similarly "jaded".
>There is no way to prove that intelligence gained at >Guantanamo had any hand in making that happen, but >chances are it did.
Congratulations, that is logic worthy of Peter Griffin.
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Ben Franklin
Torture, besides being unconstitutional, is usually unsuccessful. You can beat or waterboard or rip out fingernails and at one point the victim will tell you anything you want to hear.
No true 9/11 Family would let this shit go unnoticed. OBAMA, WE'VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU!
No true 9/11 Family would let this shit go unnoticed. OBAMA, WE'VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU!
Bottom line: Gitmo is a shit sandwich. There is no really good way to deal with it, but it has to be ended. Iraq war is a similar situation.
Thank you George Bush. The country will be cleaning up after your messes for at least 10-20 years. At least.
"Thank you George Bush. The country will be cleaning up after your messes for at least 10-20 years. At least."
Thank you Pres. Bush for ZERO attacks on America after 9/11.
And here's what we can expect from Barak Hussein Obama closing Gitmo without even talking to his Nat Security advisors:
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2009/01/nefa_foundation_video_of_forme.php
If you want the jihadi scum freed so badly, why don't you call for them to be given jobs in YOUR kids school.