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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (436094)	11/21/2008 6:47:23 PM
From: Gersh Avery	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571040

Dear Obama: Here is a way to trim a few billion out of the federal budget with the backing of the majority of the people. End the war. Set the marijuana pow's free. End the criminal trials based on laws that the majority of Americans are against. You are about to set potential terrorists free from gitmo. How about the thousands of US marijuana pow's right here in the United States? Is having a plant worse than being a terrorist? Clean out space in federal, state and local jails and prisons. Ease budget problems for states at the same time. Clean off space in courtroom dockets and free up probation and parole manpower. Ease legal system overcrowding for the entire nation at every level. And do it all with one single order. All this would only take you a few seconds and very little effort. Only your signature. And I'm sure that thousands of lawyers across the nation would gladly draft the order for you. Some, perhaps, would even do it free of charge. There is no reason to continue wasting government resources this way, given our current economic situation. Get'er done on day one.

To: longnshort who wrote (436094)	12/9/2008 3:01:06 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571040

Now for an Honest Debate on Gitmo By WILLIAM MCGURN What should we do with people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? Not all that long ago, Guantanamo was simply one more manifestation of the wickedness of George W. Bush. Back then, the operating assumption appeared to be that the only people being held at Guantanamo were innocent goat herders whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a result, the focus was on detainee abuse and their lack of rights, as witness an Associated Press headline from last December: "Lawyers complain iguanas at Guantanamo get more legal protection than detainees." One year later, we now have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 plotters at Gitmo saying they want to plead guilty. And the headlines have begun to concede that closing the detention center will not be as easy as the critics suggested. "Closing detainee camp a minefield of critical steps," notes the Miami Herald. "Closing it may be the easy part; With Guantanamo, the issue for Obama will be deciding what to do with the 250 prisoners, experts say" reports the L.A. Times. "Close Guantanamo prison? Sure. But that's the easy part," says USA Today. What unites all these stories is the acknowledgment of the basic fact of Guantanamo: The problem is the people, not the place. As evidence of this new openness, the New York Times recently ran a piece reporting that "even some liberals are arguing that to deal realistically with terrorism, the new administration should seek Congressional authority for preventive detention of terrorism suspects deemed too dangerous to release even if they cannot be successfully prosecuted." Exactly. The real issue isn't even so much the idea of trying these men in federal courts, which has already been done with Zacarias Moussaoui. The real issues for the president-elect are as follows: Where in America would you put these men? Would you release them on American soil if they are found not guilty? What about those whose home countries will not take them back? And what do you do with the toughest cases: those for whom the evidence is insufficient for a trial, but sufficient to tell us they are far too dangerous to release? During the campaign, of course, both John McCain and Barack Obama vowed to close Gitmo down. But a President Obama will likely find it easier to do the prudent thing. As a Republican hawk charged by his opponent with representing a third Bush term, Mr. McCain would have been under immense pressure to prove that he wasn't George W. Bush. And a hasty closing of Guantanamo would have been a high-profile way to do it. Fortunately, Mr. Obama is under no such pressure. For one thing, his opposition to the war gives him better credentials to do the wise thing here. For another, at least during his "honeymoon" period, the press is likely to give him a pass for whatever he comes up with -- even if the substance of what he decides seems to echo his predecessor. Yes, it's a double standard. But it could turn out to be a good thing for the nation. What the American people need today is a sensible policy that recognizes three facts: that terrorists present a unique challenge to our rules of war; that capturing and holding terrorists is different from capturing and holding criminals or prisoners of war; and that the men and women who set up Guantanamo did so not because they were out to shred the Constitution but because, faced with some very imperfect choices, this was thought to be the best way to protect the American people. It's true that Mr. Obama repeated his pledge to close Guantanamo during his recent "60 Minutes" interview. But he also declined to set a date. No doubt he is now realizing a hard truth. While senators can say what they please and go to sleep untroubled, presidents cannot escape the consequences of their decisions. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, hopes we might finally be getting a real debate. Though he has criticized some of the legal reasoning behind the Bush administration's terror policies, he says the animus against President Bush has corrupted our public discourse by making the issue the character of the good men and women trying to protect us rather than the enemy they were trying to stop. Mr. Goldsmith notes that Mr. Obama is in a position to end the acrimony and strike a prudent way forward. "The single best thing about the election of Obama," he says, "may be that we now have a chance to view the terror threat without the distorting lens of Bush hatred." Write to MainStreet@wsj.com online.wsj.com