Bush was, is, and always will be a moronic underachieving idiot. I would say he is a moron but that would mean that he has a mental age of a seven year old. I don't want to be putting down the first graders now would I?
Fortunately, President Obama has been quickly working to make Bush look extremely intelligent between his foreign policy blunders, thinking the US invented the automobile, and his chief science advisor's idea that we can stop global warming by using different pollutants to cause global cooling.
Yep, big difference between last year and this year.
Obama has made a few decisions that aren't the best, but the entire Guantanamo Bay = being too nice to terrorists thing... Srsly? I sure as HELL agree with him there. Oooh, we suspect *insert person* of having planned or done *insert terrorist activity*. So let's just imprison them for no reason aside from that. Or kill them, again with no further reasoning needed.
Hmm, no. Not when we're supposed to be BETTER than those countries, supposed to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Personally I don't care if a "terrorist" "gets away" with something because they were found innocent in a U.S. court and moves in next to me, because they are either truly innocent or far smarter than our justice system... And therefore should be leading our country if anything.
EDIT: Further, pretty much any "terrorist" that gets tried will more than likely be found guilty just because they're suspected anyway... So I really don't see the point in bitching about going through the motions instead of holing them up in Guantanamo Bay.
The problem regarding the Guantanamo situation is complex. First, you seem to be under this idea that most Guantanamo detainees were some guys we found talking bad about the US or something. Yes, I will not disagree that there are some people that fall into that category, and if they are full citizens of the US they should be treated as such. But the other ~99% of the detainees are guys we picked up raiding terrorist camps or caught trying to kill American soldiers (sounds like reasoning to me), but these guys have no allegiance to any organized country. So, the rules of war get very foggy as all the UN policies regarding this do not apply, because they were all written in a way to deal with catching prisoners of a declared foreign army.
Terrorist organization do not fall under the specific UN guidelines for POWs. So, the question is how do you deal with them? The US Constitution does have some things laid out for this kind of situation.
Article 1, Section 8 (aka, Powers of Congress)
To define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas, and offenses against the law of nations;
To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;
These were designed to deal with pirates, as at the time those were the only known threats that were not affiliated with other governments, but if you apply the same standards to non-affiliated terrorist groups then there has been no violation of the Constitution as it allows congress to define who and what should happen.
Nowhere does it say that they are to be treated as US citizens.
Zrow
Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist. He was afforded a fair trial, was FOUND GUILTY and SENTENCED TO DEATH. I suspect Khalid would find himself in similar circumstances.
Timothy McVeigh was a US citizen. Khalid is not. Khalid falls under what I posted above, McVeigh falls under different circumstances.
Note: I am saying that any US citizen suspected of terrorist activity should be given proper legal recourse, but non-US citizens do not fall in that same category, and since they don't declare allegiance to any foreign government they must fall under the same rules set up to deal with pirates due to their lack of governmental allegiance.
Simply put: Guantanamo does not violate the Constitution. Whether it is the best option is a totally different discussion. But it came down to Congress having to decide what to do with these guys and they chose to detain them there until they had a final tribunal system in place.
Whether their treatment there was proper or not is also a matter for debate. But one question that has to be asked is: If we brought these guys to US federal prisons and stuck them in with everyone else, would they have lived through the night?
Guantanamo may be some ethically ambiguous ground, but the question is if there was anything much better that could be done.
