However, this is not the concern of the holders of the keys of Gitmo. This was a camp -created- for the purpose of locking people away without trial indefinitely.

Again – if a person is a terrorist, they can be found guilty in a legitimate court of law and locked up for the rest of their lives, so the “no one wants to release a prisoner and then have that prisoner kill someone� doesn’t apply. The same excuse can be used to justify keeping all prisoners – no matter how minor the crime – locked up for life sentences.

In the end, prisoners released and returned to Britain have had scant or no evidence showing anything even connecting them to terrorism, which makes it seem that Gitmo is not even being used for the purpose of holding actual terrorists.

The argument about free trials would remain so if we knew more about exactly who is being held there. This is a breeding ground for conspiracy theory. A few people here think the U.S. already –has- Osama in one of the camps just to use him as a bogeyman. In truth, we don’t know. They could be terrorists. They could be innocent people. They could be people who spoke out against the Bush administration. This is all done in secrecy and if these guys actually were terrorists, there’d be no need for the secrecy, nor would there be a problem with actually charging them with crimes.

In short, Gitmo is a political prison for those stripped of all rights to a trial. Whether or not it’s a political prison that actually holds real terrorists or just those in the wrong place at the wrong time or Bush’s political enemies is a significant question, but we can’t even begin to form an answer and history teaches us in this situation to always assume the worst.

We shouldn’t have to trust the government’s assertions that these are “bad men� and that even if we did, these “bad men� still deserve a right to trial.

If the prisoners are terrorists, they should be charged.

You actually make the best argument for closing down Gitmo when you say “None of us have any idea about who they have or what circumstances they were caught” (although there’s alot of evidence that suggests that alot of them were innocent victims just kidnapped and turned in for rewards and favors by local warlords.)

Something like this should be a matter of the public record. We don’t know who is down there. Are they innocent? Are they guilty? We have a process to determine that in the United States - it’s called a trial. Even the guilty in the United States have a right to one.

What is occuring is that these are people being held indefinetly without charge, and that there is significant evidence they are being tortured.

As for your assertion that “it certainly looks like alot of the kidnappees in Iraq aren’t at a holiday camp either.” - that’s true. I think the entire point, though, is that Western Civilization is supposed to be better than some thugs with machetes. If you cannot justify the behavior in Iraqi kidnappers, then how can you justify the behavior in Americans who have lived in a free society and should very damn well know better?

In the end, the problem is that we don’t know if these people are a security risk. We don’t know who makes that determination, what criteron that determination is made, if the material presented is accurate - all of this is occuring in the dark, away from the eyes of the public.

If these people are criminals, charge them. Give them trials. If they are guilty, lock them away in jail.

If they are innocent, they deserve to be released and it is a value of free societies that we are more than willing to let some guilty go free to prevent any innocent from being wrongly imprisoned.

If you are an American, and you have even the slightest shred of hope that it can be turned from it’s current path, then you owe it to fight however you can.

If you are an American, and you have no hope, there’s no sense in staying.

I have no hope.

respectfully
BJ

However, I do agree with you that the most part of NZ’ers will have no idea how constrained the public is in the US by the current administration.
FWIW, I’m never goin to qualify for a visa to the USA, I’ve yelled at the Ambassador here a couple times too many…. (at public occasions, for the record…)

The US Embassey keeps trying to put pressure on our Police and security policy wonks to get the same level of repression of civil liberties happening here, that goes on without question in the US. They didn’t count on the legacy of British legal process in this ex-colony, which creates an alternate environment for change/repression to that which the US Constitution allows.

Although having said that, John Howard allowed anti-terrorist legislation based on US law. But Aussies are way more redneck than Kiwis, straight off the bat - look at the Cronulla riots.

Brash has been doing his best to incite race riots in NZ, but there are far to many educated liberals-thinking people, who analyse the shit out of media, and know when they’re being spun, because they check the original text that’s being referred to…. and spot the deliberate insult to their intelligence.

Both politicians and media make that mistake, but react differently to getting caught - Brash’s gradual retraction from “I know nothing” to “Yes, I met with them, and they said they were going to do this, but I didn’t commission them to do it” over the Exclusive Bretheren pamphlets during the 2005 election campaign is a classic example of painstakingly shoving one’s foot further down one’s own throat.

Anything that brings media and politicians to an acknowledgement that their best efforts at hiding the truth have failed is good, by my yardstick.

Good on Keith for taking a public stand outside the Consulate, and telling the representatives of the Bush Administration that we won’t be bullied into ignoring their international law abuses.
If they want to destroy their own country, well be that as it may. But they’ve lost their mandate to be in another nation’s territory, be it Iraq, Palestine or here, when they refuse to accept governance from the International body they set up after WW2 in the first place.

The UN’s official languages are French and English at the behest of the USA, who compromised to allow a European language to be used in official communications; historically, French was the ligua franca of diplomats throughout Europe, and English was hardly spoken (especially by the British monarchy, who mostly spoke German, but I digress….), so for them to reneg on the UN deal just because the rest of the world won’t sanction their bullying is pretty rank. It’s time they stopped their illegal wars.

[Editor and Publisher]
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_c ontent_id=1001995631

Hmmm….

respectfully
BJ