President Obama announced Monday that military trials will resume for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, a move that won praise from Republicans, who say the president has finally “seen the light” on the value of trying such detainees at the facility.
Obama, saying he wants to “broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice,” issued an executive order outlining the changes Monday afternoon, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates rescinded a January 2009 ban against bringing new charges against terror suspects in the military commissions.
“I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system — including Article III courts — to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened,” the president said in a written statement. Article III courts are civilian federal courts.
Rep. Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, praised the move as “clearly another step in the right direction.”
“The bottom line is that it affirms the Bush administration policy that our government has the right to detain dangerous terrorists until the cessation of hostilities,” King said.
And House Judiciary Commitee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the president is affirming Republicans’ belief that terrorists should be treated as enemy combatants rather than criminal defendants.
“Though it took more than two years, I am pleased that the Obama administration has finally seen the light on military commission trials,” Smith said.
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4 Responses
About time the Big Cheese realized that al-Qaeda members aren’t humans.
#1,
Not all of them are Al Qaeda members. And in the United States of America, even hateful people get due process.
No. 1: There are lots of awful but correct things to say about al-Qaeda, but you have chosen to say something that anti-Semites have said about Jews for centuries that is awful and incorrect and, well, dehumanizing. That is no help.
nfgo3:
Certainly, they are members of Homo sapiens. Certainly, they have human emotions and intelligence. But Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines human, adjectival definition 3b, as “susceptible to or representative of the sympathies [and frailties] of human nature”.
charliehall
That is precisely why, my friend, that these “unlawful enemy combatants” (I have no qualms about parroting Bush II, sir) are to be tried in Guantánamo Bay… in Cuba. Not “in the United States”.