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by rdl 4908 days ago
Guantanamo is different. There are a lot of people there (fewer now) who don't belong there, but others I'd have to try hard not to murder, myself.

The problem with Guantanamo is the lack of legal process, and the way some people were swept up who shouldn't have been (which mostly got resolved in 2005-2006), not that many of them aren't horrible criminals. I'd be fine with prosecuting them all in federal civilian court with fair trials.

2 comments

> There are a lot of people there (fewer now) who don't belong there, but others I'd have to try hard not to murder, myself.

That's what makes (made?!) America so great in the eyes of many (myself included) that have never set foot in there, i.e. the concept that anyone deserves a fair trial, based on actual evidence, and that you wouldn't be f.cked up by the judicial system during the whole process (perdon my French).

That's what happened in Aaron's case, he was f.cked up by the system, at least that's how I see the initial threat of spending 35 (or was it 50?) years in prison for something that didn't involve murdering young kids and raping them after the deed. A judicial system that depends on threats (doesn't matter if they're implicit or not) gets dangerously close to pure dictatorship.

Yeah, this is why police and prosecutors (and judges/juries) should be separate people. It's unreasonable to expect me to not want to kill someone who a couple years earlier was trying to kill me.
The problem with Guantanamo is that it exists at all as an extra-judiciary area specifically designed to deny inmates certain rights.
The whole point of the tactics used against Aaron was to render his right to a trial by jury too risky and expensive to exercise. In both cases, the legal accountability of the Executive Branch is what's being undermined - by the Executive Branch.
I'd be fine with holding them there for physical security reasons; just ensure that normal US law applies as it would on a US federal military base in the mainland US.