November 13, 2008- Closing Up Shop

   Barack Obama may very well have more promises to the American people in order to get elected than any other Presidential candidate in American history, and that is saying something. Considerimng that every Presidetnial candidatre promises this, that, and the other thing to the electorate every time around, for Obama to break their records is every bit as astounding as him breaking all fundraising records like he did. However, he seems to have done so by essentially promising to change everything about America during his term, a particularly ambitious platform if there ever was one. Obama made promises concerning everything under the sun, domestic programs in America, foreign policies, and war policies as well. That last one is perhaps the most important of these all, because Obama is going to be a wartime President the first second he is sworn in, and he is not shying away from that Commander-In-Chief position either. he inyends to wage war against America's enemies, and do it right, so there is zero chance of America being at peacetime with Obama as President, so the ways that he wants to wage the war are of utmost importance, far more so than the other social program shit. For it will be these two wars that America is fightimng that are going to define Obama in the end, just as they are to define Bush, and Obama wants to be remembered in a very different way than Bush is when it becomes his time to call it a day and retire. So that means that he needs to have more obvious successes at waging these wars, and one sure way to do that is to keep away from the controversies and problems that have dogged the Bush Administration during the wars. There have been as many scandals in the war as there have been stirring military victories, and the scandals are what people are going to remember for years to come. The biggest of these scandals has been the hijinks that have gone on at American POW camps, specifically, how POW's have been treated. Shit got so far out of hand that people like Lyndsey England became household names, and not for valor and bravery on the battlefield either. They became known for shit like posing for pictures as they tortured prisoners, for abusing  those in their custody almost 24 hours a day, for making problems for Washington that were far worse than anything that the insurgents or jihadis could ever make, and that shit harmed the war effort quite a bit. People all over America were outraged by tghe pictures that they saw and the stories that they heard about how POW's were being treated in American prisons, and that shit became a major problem for the Bush Administration to deal with as they tried to wage two wars at once. There were two symbols of this problem, the Abu Gharib POW Camp in Iraq, andf the Guantanamo Bay POW Camp in Cuba. The stories that came out of these two places were astounding, and they forced the Bush Administration to constantly be defending itself from its own people instead of from the enemy, because these stories upset so many Americans so badly.Obama needs to be able to avoid shit like this if he is going to fight these wars effectively, and he knows it too, and that is why he is ready to hit the ground running on that subject as well as many others when he takes office next January. So he made some promises about that to the American people, and now that he is elected, he needs to make good on them or at least figure out just what the fuck to do about all of this. However, this is all easier promised than done, ande Obama is finding that out very quickly these days.

   The main thing that he has promised as a way to clean up all these problems is to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba. He picked that one because it is the original POW camp in the war effort, and thusly, the original source of the problems that Bush faced from all of this. Guantamo Bay has become a symbol of this place where the people go in but never come out, and while they are in there, are subjected to the most heinous of torments. Their Korans are flushed down the toilet, they get menstruating whores to come in and smear their bloody pussies across these detainee's faces, they are forced to beat off, they are buttfucked and beaten, so go the stories about Guantanamo Bay. However, the biggest problem with that place is the fact that people are sent there and just left there for years at a time, even if they are deemed to be of no real threat to anyone, serving no real purpose either. The gtovernment says that ther eare some high-ranking cats in the prison,but they are a very small percentage, most of them have just been teenage kids that got caught up in all this shit and conscripted to fight against America and got caught. Nonetheless, they have been sitting in that prison for years now and are no closer to getting out than they were the first day that they went in. The Bush Administration said that they were going to set up secret military tribunals to try these enemy combatants, but the problem has been that these have moved at a decidedly glacial pace over the years. It took until Bush's second term to get these things started at all, and there have been a few here and there, and some dudes have been sent back to some other country, and some have been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but the majority of them have continued to sit there and sit there  waiting their trials. Obama promised that he would close Guantanamo Bay down and finally do something with these prisoners, that he would fly them into the United States, to some Federal Prison somewhere, where they would be held and get themselves a criminal trial, like the ones that Federal defendants get when they get busted, so that something could finally be resolved with these guys and the war effort streamlined and bettered because of it. That campaign promise got that fucker a whole shitload of votes, because many Americans want Guantanamo Bay closed down for good, as they see it as a symbol of inefficiency and shame. That place got a bad reputation at the very start of the war, with the pictures of the chained, shackled, blindfolded and deprived of sensory stimulation prisoners, with the Ameerican soldiers holding guns to their heads and such, and that reputation has not improved much at all since those days. Obama seized on that and said all across America that he would close Guantanamo Bay down, and even make that one of the first things that he did upon taking office. Now that he is preparing to take office,he is finding out that this promise is not as easily kept as he thought, that closing Guantanamo Bay down is not quite like closing down a marina in the fall or anything like that, closing this fucker down is a much larger project indeed. So he and his people have been backing off of that promise a bit in this last week, saying that maybe they did not mean what they said literally and such, because closing down Guantanamo Bay is something that has long term ramifications on many different levels, and Obama is just realizing that now.

   The biggest problem is this idea of taking these POW's and putting them into the American Federal court system and giving them trials like they are some kind of criminals, like a moonshiner, a tax cheat, or someone with a PCP lab. Never before in history has a country ever taken those that have taken up arms on the battlefield against and it and put those people into its legal system with the idea of meting out punishments for what they did. So there is no precedent at all for doing this in any legal system on earth, let alone America's, so that proposes a problem for Obama. First of all, where are you going to take these guys when they leave Guantanamo and who houses them and who tries them and so forth. Federal prisons are bursting at the seams these days, and an influx of these battlefield prisoners is not going to easily absorbed by an already severely overburdened system. Many jurisdictions across America could nlt afford to take these fuckers at all, they could not afford to house them and try them and such, and the ones that could would not want them either, because the costs surrounding these prisoners woiuld be extraordinarily high, as they would need special treatment all the way. It would be a bad idea to take these guys and put them in with rthe general federal inmate population, because if there ever were prisoners that had targets on their backs, it would be these guys, they would sink right to the bottom of the prison Hierarchy and be preyed on by everyone there. They would have to be hused seperately, and with space in Federal prisons so hard to come by, that would not be easly accomplished at all. Add to that the fact that these guys are jihadis and enemy combatants, and if you put them in with the rest of the inmates, that gives them a chance to continue their jihad by killing Americans, so there's no fucking way that they could be housed anywhere near the other inmates. Their trials would be an expensive nightmare as well, as regular legal procedures could not be followed, as these acts were commited on a battlefield, not on the streets of America. There would be delay after delay as objections and problems would crop up every step of the way, as military protocol and legal rules do not mix well, especially in this war. It would be almost impossible to convict all but the most high ranking POW's of anything, because surely, some Federal legal rule was violated in the course of the case, and those types of technicalities are what get most Federal defendants off of the charges, they are dropped on technicalities. The cases of these POW's would be riddled with technicality after technicality, and an awful lot of them would end up getting charges dropped due to that, and then the problems becomes what to do with them now. If they were freed, most of them could never go back home, because they won't have them there, they are considered American spies and shit, and they'd be killed as soon as they got back. That would mean that thge other option was to let these fuckers go free here in America, essentially releasing people that you said were the most dangerous folks alive, who wanted to destroy America, its way of life, and its people as well, releasing them into  American society so that they could move in right next door to you and your family someday. Shit like this would cause Obama way the fuck more problems than Guantanamo Bay has caused Bush, so he is saying that he wants to look into all his options as far as Guantanamo is concerned because he knows that fulfilling his promise to the letter would cause him way too many problems, so he has to figure out another way to go about this.

   However, the answer is staring the dude right in his face, Bush gave that to him. The answer is to make sure that these military tribunals are taking place regularly, not making people wait for years to have their day in court, and that these things are at least remotely fair. The Bush Administration has been stepping things up on that end as of late, and they are showing Obama how to handle this. Even though the freed dudes cannot go back home in most cases, Washington is reaching agreements with other nations to take these people in and let them live there, and these other nations are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts or a spirit of Muslim brotherhood or anything like that, they are doing it because Washington is giving them money to do this shit. They just take these freed POW's and throw them  into the back fringes of their society, essentially a handshake and a "good luck", and by doing so , they ensure that these fuckers won't end up right back on the battlefields against America anytme soon, or at all. There's a lot of money to be made by some country or countries that realize that and become Washington's dumping ground for their POW's, where the ones that have no homes anymore can go upon release. All that Obama has to do is to streamline this system and make this happen, and he makes the problem disappear like he said that he would. Perhaps some tinkering with the tribunal system is in order, like not making them secret things anymore, but there is no reason to take these fuckers and bring them into the American legal system at all. There is a large difference between them and what they have done and the criminals that are in the American legal system and what they have done, and the citizens of America do not need to be punished by having these motherfuckers come into their legal system in large numbers, because in iorder to compensate for them, the rights of Federal defendants would have to be severely curtailed, worse than they already are, and it would be the citizens of America that would lose, not these POW's. So unles Obama wants to unleash havoc upon the Federal justice system, he should not close Guantanamo Bay down at all, what he needs to do is to use it for what Bush said it was going to be used for at the beginning, not as a place where people go into it and never come out again. As long as he stops these fucked-up stories of abuse that have come out of Guantanamo Bay, her won't have a problem with it. If he makes the American people think that Guantanamo Bay is a place where accused enemy combatants are taken and held until trial, and then dealt with according to the ajudication reached, they'll forget all about the place, Bush just fucked up by making it look like some sort of evil castle in a monster movie, but Obama is more savvy than that and realizes what he has to do here. His main problem is how he is going to explain going back on a campaign promise that led to many votes, but if he does that while America is still looking at him with starry eyes and considering him a Savior and Messiah, he can get away with that one easily, so look for him to make a firm decision on Guantanamo Bay and what he is going to do with it shortly after he takes office in January, but that decision won't be the one that he promised the American people that he would make. Guantanamo Bay is not shutting down, or even changing much at all, they are just going to be more selective as to who they hold there for long periods of time, and a lot more secretive about how they handle things inside there. The tribunals will still be shams, with outcomes virtually assured, but they'll make the American people think that Guantanamo Bay is in good hands at last, and it will become an issue that everyone forgets about very quickly.