on getting an "honorable mention in the 20 most annoying liberals" at the Right Wing News. Considering the source, and the good company you're in, it's a compliment.

http://rightwingnews.com/mt331/2009/01/the_7th_annual_20_most_annoyin.php

is accepting donations to deliver white roses to Obama, asking for a ceasefire:

"Donate $5 today and we will deliver Barack Obama a bouquet of white roses, harkening back to the White Rose Society—the WWII non-violent resistance group in Germany. This tiny band of college students and their professor adopted the motto "We will not be silent" and exposed what they saw and knew was happening around them...

Once you donate, please call Obama's transition team at 1-202-540-3000, press 2, and ask Obama to use use his leadership and call for a ceasefire."

(link at sig)

In the U.S., high political officials aren't investigated, let alone held accountable, for lawbreaking, and that is rather clearly something Obama has no intention of changing.

True, unless it involves sex and you're from outside the village, needing to be educated about how to act upon arrival in it. Then a special prosecutor is absolutely necessary.

Torture? Violations of the Constitution you swore to uphold? That's different, the concerns quaint.

Reagan loved labor unions, when they were in Poland. The villagers hate torture, when it happens in Liberia.

that the nation's first African-American President may, if Glenn's assessment proves true, be announcing that the Constitutional principle laid out in Brown v. Mississippi has become, like the Geneva Conventions, "pre-9/11 thinking." That case involved black prisoners being whipped and then further tortured until they "confessed," later to be convicted on this evidence alone. The opinion of a unanimous Supreme Court overturning the convictions stated:

"Coercing the supposed state's criminals into confessions and using such confessions so coerced from them against them in trials has been the curse of all countries. It was the chief iniquity, the crowning infamy of the Star Chamber, and the Inquisition, and other similar institutions. The Constitution recognized the evils that lay behind these practices and prohibited them in this country."

You're right about juvenile justice here. Remember the U.N. Resolution against imprisoning children and teenagers for life without the possibility of parole? "The United States stands alone in the world in convicting young adolescents as adults and sentencing them to live out their lives in prison. According to a new report, there are 73 Americans serving such sentences for crimes they committed at 13 or 14."

The vote in the U.N. was 185 to 1 and, you guessed it, we were #1. (link at sig)

We have 270 people who have been deeply wronged, and scarred psychologically, who would be sent back to countries without help for mental illnesses our government created, but because we've wronged them so badly and created a perfect formula for a terrorist, if we don't act against them we're "naive," their continued detention being similar to drunk driving laws or prohibitions against tank purchasing.

And "America is such a screwed up society" because people don't want to deal with this problem by letting these deeply wronged people go after years of being held offshore without charge?

As easy as it is to ridicule your position, what's ironic is that it's similar to what the government argued recently in favor of continued detention without charge. Thankfully the judge saw its radicalism, there being no statute prohibiting developing terroristic attitudes toward the country that tortured and held you without charge or evidence, offshore, for years.

My position is simple: If you don't have evidence to charge these people in court, let them go, the lack of evidence revealing that the justice system cannot hold them and still rightfully hold the name. What's yours?

BTW, I didn't call you a moron or a traitor, just pointed out that acknowledging the "immense wrongs" these people were subjected to and then implying that holding them for future threats was justifiable (it being similar to prohibiting drunk driving) had no proper place in a nation that claims to be the "land of the free."

Some issues are difficult but this one isn't. No evidence, no continued detention. No detention for the anger we created, period. If that's our policy, the threat from the recruiting blitz such a policy creates easily outweighs the potential risk angry tortured but evidence-free detainees represent.

I appreciate that you acknowledge the terrible treatment, but I just wish you'd realize that continuing to hold them because they're likely upset enough about the waterboard to want to attack us is not like drunk driving laws. It's like holding a person after a DNA exoneration because they might be so screwed up from prison that they might drive drunk, wanting to drown out the horror of being in prison for years while innocent.

Hamdan gave Charles Swift half his meager possessions after the Supreme Court case, likely shocked that a Naval officer took his case to the Supreme Court and won. Now that Hamdan's out, Swift's action will likely keep us safer, don't you think? But if Obama keeps holding these detainees without evidence, the world will blame the country instead of "W" and we'll be more at risk.