I feel sorry for the 9/11 families but find it baffling they are upset with Obama for closing Gitmo. Gitmo has been a huge stain on the fabric of justice in our country. These families must realize that even if Obama allowed these military commissions to continue, any guilty verdict rendered would be eventually overturned. These commissions are a mockery of justice. They allow evidence obtained by torture. They allow secret evidence to be used against defendants, which defendants have no way of challenging. These people should be upset with Bush over this, not Obama.

They lost loved ones. Everybody loses loved ones. PEOPLE DIE EVERY DAY and being related to one does not make you special.

Tens of thousands of people have died in traffic accidents since 2001--their families don't expect to have the roads shut down and special memorials erected at every cloverleaf and they certainly don't expect to have the Constitution suspended and have hundreds of other motorists rounded up and detained indefinitely so they can feel that Justice Has Been Done.

The 9/11 families were flattered and stroked and put up on pedestals because the Bush Administration needed someone on whose behalf it was okay to invade Iraq--someone who, if you questioned the War On Terror, you could be accused of betraying.

Barack Obama yesterday basically told Americans they have to stop being a bunch of selfish, self-absorbed crybabies. Grow up. Grow the fuck up and start being worthy of your country.

These families need to feed new obsessions

For the living remainders of their years..

I understand that the far left here has made it their ratio sum ultra to drop everything that's a problem in the US and focus on these 200 foreigners to the exclusion of everything else. But in the end you AND the 911 families deserve one another in the fight of who's tears are saltier.

Maybe you can sort it out with cage fighting or something.

Praise the Lord and pass the biscuits! At last, something that almost resembles justice. Almost. The 9/11 families were conned. We all were. I just read a book by someone who was in one of the towers. The first thing she heard was an explosion and everyone shouting 'It's a bomb! Get out! Get out!' She also saw a woman with so much flesh blown off her arms that she could see her bones. She claims not to accept that the buildings were blown up but in almost every chapter she refers to the 'explosions' and relates that at one point she was hit by what she referred to as 'an exploding torso'. She also writes: 'I glanced up and out the window because I heard an explosion. I thought at first that a bomb had gone off', 'Inside tower one the stairs shook and flights collapsed', 'the explosions undoubtedly sealed more exits, trapped more people', 'there was a small tremor. It lasted only a few seconds but I guess it caused the building to twist more because some doors...slammed shut and jammed shut', 'I exited the stairs at the plaza level but barely recognized it...it's voice now was the crackle of fire and random explosions', 'people were running frantically trying to get away from the explosions and the flames', 'I saw fires so hot that in minutes concrete was ash', 'No one knew how to remove tens of thousands of people from the blast radius of a triggered time bomb', 'We knew of the explosions that wipe out reason', 'The building rocked from side to side...loud bangs resonated from the north side of the office, the windows were shaking and glass exploded from everywhere', 'the explosions were so loud and threatening', 'the building swayed again and then settled'. The book's called 'Between Heaven and Ground Zero'. Obama faces the Augean stables and he's going to need a shovel of cosmic proportions to clean it up.

I enjoy

How you buzz about

In your little flying saucer

Actin'

All

Like

You're

Little

Space alien person

Is so knowing

So witty

So preciously

Smart..

But I know damn sure if I were taste your little crococodile tears..

They'd probably taste a whole lot less salty

And a whole lot more tart..

According to the right wing noise machine closing Guantanamo = letting terrorists go free, which is of course a lie.

Closing Gitmo = giving the "suspected terrorists" a fair trail. If they are guilty they will be subjected to the living hell of our prison system, if they are innocent then they will be set free.

The right wing fears the latter because if they are found not to be guilty then that means that THEY are guilty of being a party to kidnapping, imprisoning and torturing innocent people.

One thing a sociopath can never do is admit he/she is wrong. Just look at Cheney.

Specifically, they are mad at the people directly involved with the 911 plot.... but what about the countless number of other people who were rounded up in Afghanistan and are merely "suspected" of wrongdoing and are now sitting in Guantanamo waiting for their day in court.

I sincerely hope they learn to forgive no matter how difficult it may be.

The judge, Patrick Parrish, agreed today to suspend the trial for 120 days.

(http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20090120/Khadr_obama_090121/20090121/?hub=TorontoNewHome)

For many years I have wondered about the right wing's mantra about caring for "victims' rights" over the rights of accused persons. It has never made sense to me that people would get "closure" from punishing a person who did them no harm, i.e. was innocent of the crime they were accused of.

I feel sorry for the people who lost family members in the Twin Towers, but of the 250 or so people who are still in Guantanamo probably no more than 10 are plausibly connected to Al Qaeda. The vast majority have been held for no plausible reason except that no one wants to take the chance that they might be "dangerous." I expect that some of them are, and some are dangerous now who wouldn't have been if they hadn't been abused for six years.

The question of what we are going to do with those detainees who are "dangerous" is a false question. Every day the courts release people who are dangerous. These are people who have been accused of violent criminal activity but the courts have decided the evidence against them was insufficient to convict them. The same principle should apply to the Guantanamo detainees. If you have sufficient evidence, try them either in civil court (there are procedures available to handle "classified" evidence), or by court martial as specified by the Unified Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Convention. If you don't, then let them go. The only problem I see is reparations to those whose detention was utterly without basis and finding some place for them to go -- and if we can't send them to another country we're going to have to allow them residence in the U.S.