Thursday, January 22, 2009



Guantanamo: keeping his word

Barrack Obama has lived up to his word, and requested the suspension of Guantanamo's kangaroo courts pending a full review of the military commission process. It's not an immediate closure, but its the first step, and will end at least one of Guantanamo's injustices: the unfair show trials under a process designed to secure conviction. The next step is to move those inmates against whom there is credible and admissible evidence into the normal justice system, and try them before normal courts under normal laws and the usual rules of evidence. As for inmates who do not meet those criteria - including those whose cases have been irrevocably tainted by torture and abuse - they are simply going to have to be released. That is what US law and US values require, and it is what the US would demand for one of its own citizens overseas in the same circumstances; they can do no less for those they hold themselves. And if the NeoCons complain, well, they should have thought about that before they started torturing people...