07-08-2009, 06:51 AM
Thanks for the link, Rob. It wouldn't let me post a comment so I'll do it here. We now have evidence that Councilman Kelly Greenwell is the first certified Liberal American Fascist.
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Taliban Coming to Hawaii?
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07-08-2009, 07:34 AM
What do the Chinese have to do with the Taliban? The Taliban at Gitmo are from Afganastan and a small handful from Iraq... why wouldn't they just ship them back to where they picked them up from? I guess I'm missing something here.
E ho'a'o no i pau kuhihewa. 
07-08-2009, 07:50 AM
A small number of the detainees are from China and were traveling in Afghanistan when they were picked up by the U.S. Troops. A larger number of people, already mostly released, were basically sold to the U.S. troops by collecting a bounty on Taliban fighters. It was apparently convenient for some Afghan warlords to tell the U.S. that various strangers or competitors for their heroin trade were Taliban. Many got swept up. Plenty of bad guys too.
Assume the best and ask questions.
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07-08-2009, 08:45 AM
quote:good grief, centipede, why would you give Fox news any special credence? I watched Fox news after the Big Island quake (the PUAKO-centered quake), and learned that: rescuers had still been unable to contact residents of the remote villages on the slopes of Mauna Loa; their fate was still unknown. Did they have food and water? Would they be found alive? Would it be days until we knew for sure? I tried to figure out what the heck they were talking about. Volcano Village perhaps? [:0] There wasn't even real damage in Puna, much less roads cut off. The power may have gone off for the day. They made it sound like the kind of disaster we hear about in Central or South America when a natural disaster wipes out little villages without technology. And there are plenty of people who don't know better who buy into this stuff. FOX news is in business to hype any kind of "threat" or drama out of all proportion and to whip people into a frenzy. [  ] The news is poorly reported enough these days without repeating what the National Enquirer of TV News is mongering.
07-08-2009, 09:41 AM
quote:Exactly! WHY????
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Whatever you assume,please just ask a question first.
07-08-2009, 09:53 AM
http://tomlackey.wordpress.com/
I just did a toon on this subject, check it out The Lack The Lack Toons
07-08-2009, 01:49 PM
quote:James, I really don’t think we’ll know the truth for years to come. The US Supreme Court said that the detainees have the constitutional right to challenge their detention in US Courts. That basically means the US Constitution and the protection it provides still prevails. Essentially the US Supreme Court rejected the United States of America becoming just like the Taliban. quote:That’s true but there have been enough of this secret evidence that turned out to be false, that the judicial system is starting to question if any is real. Remember, no evidence has to be submitted except to say we have evidence. Now if some foreign government ever did that to us, we would practically drop a nuke on them. But when we do it, somehow it magically becomes all right if we wrapped it in red, white and blue. This type of justice system is what we are condemning in Iran, N. Korea, China, etc, but we accept it of ourselves? quote:Nobody is saying they get the same rights as Americans. What people are saying and the US Supreme Court agreed, they have the rights our Constitution grants everyone, citizen and non citizen. If we don’t want them to have the rights, change the Constitution. But I have to ask, why are we so afraid of putting them on trial? Why are we not demanding that these trials be held so the world can see our democracy at work? We are trying to ram it down everyone’s throats, we throw it in everyone’s face, and we want to have other countries emulate us. We are proud of our system of equal and fair justice, but we act like Kim Jong Il behind a cloak of secrecy when we could shine high a top the glory of our country! quote:But that’s the whole point. As it stands, we are about 30 innocent to every 1 that may be guilty. But how do we know they are guilty? Just because some body that was paid a bounty said they are terrorist? The concept is we are becoming just like those countries we condemn. What is different between what we are doing and what China is doing in how they handle the judicial process. If a person is guilty, put them on trial, find them guilty, and execute them if found guilty. That is what America is about, not some secret Military Junta style circus with secret evidence. Why not ask Iran or North Korea to run the tribunals? If we continue along the lines of secret courts and evidence, we need to shut our mouths when other countries do it. quote:Unfortunately we really don’t know where some came from. By the US taking control, we made them ours. Even though some detainees are innocent due to mistaken identity or were turned in just to collect our bounty, the hysteria (just like your reading here) have branded them guilty and other countries don’t want them either for fear of similar hysterical reaction. Most of our allies won’t take them because they ended up in bitter political battles with the US over their innocent citizens being grabbed without due process. France, and the UK are two examples of allies who had dozens of their citizens kidnapped by the US. When their innocence was finally determined, those countries had to fight the US to let their innocent citizens be returned. Now they are so bitter that they will not help us. Some were enemies of Al-Quida and the Taliban and were turned in to collect American bounty money. How can we release those innocent people back into their community after what they suffered at our hands? We literally made anti-americans out of innocent people. We have to find someplace that will take them; that was something we didn’t consider when we had untrained individuals paying bounties for warm bodies.
07-08-2009, 02:38 PM
There are significant differences among the prisoners. There are a large number of prisoners who were picked up on suspicions that turned out not to be justified. A lot of money was offered by the CIA for turning over Al Qaeda operatives and a lot of people turned over people just for the reward. Most of these people have been returned to the country where they came from. The problem is that some countries, particularly China and Uzbekistan will probably kill these poor souls if they are returned to them. So, Uncle Sam needs a safe place to send them, or it will be guilty of adding and abetting the murder of people it knows to be innocent. A few European countries have taken some, the Bahamas and Marshall Islands have taken a few. Their really is not reason these guys could not settle in Hawaii, they are not dangerous, but there would be nothing to forgive them for. Indeed, Uncle Sam owes them something for wrongly imprisoning them.
The next set is prisoners who really are guilty of committing crimes already. These crimes can be prosecuted, even if they occurred overseas. With many of them, the evidence against them was obtained with torture. So, it would be thrown out by a US court. A military tribunal might be able to use the evidence, after considering the probability that confessions under torture are not very reliable. (People will say what they think their torturers want to hear to stop the torture. Ironically, the methods, including water boarding, that were used by the CIA were developed from the Navy Seal training which in turn was developed from the methods used by the North Koreans and Chinese in the Korean war to get FALSE confessions to use in the propaganda war. Torture is really useless, but the CIA won't admit it.) So, these guys can be tried and convicted, just not under our system. They belong in prison. The third category is prisoners who do not seem to have committed a crime yet, but who are clearly members of Al Qaeda or related groups and would love to commit a crime against the US if they could. They can't be convicted, because they haven't done anything. They are the classic prisoners of war, who Uncle Sam is entitled to hold until the end of hostilities. (It does not matter that they didn't fight for a recognized nation, they are combatants and covered by the Geneva Convention as such.) So, there is nothing wrong with letting the first catagory settle on the Big Island, might be a good thing. The rest will not be out of prison for a while. Aloha, Rob L
Aloha,
Rob L
07-08-2009, 04:40 PM
Kahunascott . . . well said.
Kathy, we are now going to nit-pick a single story that may have gotten poor coverage from Fox? Could we list 100's of stories messed up by the competition? Didn't the latest Neilsen rating show that Fox has more viewers that CNN and MSNBC combined? Didn't Fox have 9 out of the top 10 news shows, including some of Fox's daytime shows beating CNN and MSNBC's primetime news shows? Ever think that US viewers might be making those choices with some sort of intelligent reasoning? Regarding this topic, the whole argument in creating a moral equivalent with the Japanese and Germans after WW2, is that THIS war is not over. There is still a threat, and anyone who thinks they can just ignore that is wrong. There are a lot a historical facts being stated that have no relevance to these prisoners. To clarify WHY they have not and should not be tried in a US court, is that the nature of evidence (yes, evidence) that we have against many of them, if revealed in court, or even if revealed to the detainee, would damage our ability to collect future evidence in the same way. All of our sources, technology, and channels of info would be closed. The current administration has been trying desperately to figure out what to do with Gitmo, but has come to the realization that it is not the right thing to do. I'm sure the words "I never thought about that" were often uttered in the oval office when Obama was finally educated on what is going on. He came up with this idea to send the Uighurs to Palau to appease those who voted for him, to look like he is keeping his promise. Funny, I think I read that we are giving $200 Million to Palau in order to take 17 'non-violent' prisoners . . . MORE than their GDP! And about $12 Million per prisoner! I think defending our country is worth the discomfort, violation, or execution of a few dozen or a few hundred misled lowlifes. And we should not have to live with them and share our rights with them.
07-08-2009, 04:44 PM
Things are beginning to drift off from the Hawaii perspective. PW is not going to wander too far into rant land. Kelly Greenwell? remember?
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