[Bobboau]

Really? So just let me ask... the "cessation of hostilities"... when is that gonna be?

The "truth" in this statement might as well read like:  "We still like to be able to lock up anyone  for as long as we like, k thx bye".

so you think that what Obama has done here does not affirm the Bush policy that people can be detained until whenever?

or did you not actually read the sentence?

[General Battuta]

I am not sure how you were with that, but many, many people had a reverse racism effect... Obama wasn't a politician in their eyes but a black guy (who we wooowooo consider equal). It worked fantastically for him.

Cite that right now. I want poll data, Bradley effect factoring and proof you're not bull****ting, because you're bull****ting.

Actually I'm going to spend a while dissecting this post and the misconceptions in it right now.

Obama's victory was forecast months in advance. There was little to no doubt he would win the presidency by anyone who actually understands political science. Most of the narrative you hear in the media, regarding campaigns, 'momentum', that kind of stuff, is just window dressing.

Presidental elections are predicted using what is called a fundamentals model. This model doesn't care about the name of the incumbent and the challenger. It doesn't really care which party they belong to. It doesn't care about how they campaign, unless they make a really serious gaffe. And it apparently doesn't care about the race of the candidates, either.

All it cares about is the state of the economy, the nation's wartime/peacetime status, and a few other variables.

Obama's margin of victory was called within a percentage point. Race didn't factor heavily into it; it certainly didn't work 'very, very well' for him. If it had, it would have been detected. The data we have suggests that race in fact worked much more heavily against Obama in the primaries than sex did against Clinton.

Furthermore, the term 'reverse racism', which you so casually rolled out here, is a misnomer which you should purge from your vocabulary. Discrimination along racial lines is racism, whether it's preference for blacks or preference for whites. There's very little you can do that's more effective at getting you laughed out of a scientific discussion of race.

If you need further sourcing I have three MIT political science professors within ten second's walk from my desk.

[General Battuta]

Further reading recommended to me, entitled 'Obama's Missed Landslide: A Racial Cost?'

[Black Wolf]

This is really, really bad. Not just for the whole "abuse of prisoners rights" thing, I'm talking bigger scale. I follow american politics mostly because it tends to be more interesting than ours, and this is what I predict.

If Obama falls over in 2012, that leaves you with a republican president, most likely, unless he loses the primary, but I'm not sure who'd challenge him. So, you have a republican in the white house and the lower house dominated by conservatives who are being pulled to the right by the tea baggers.

Next step is extension of the Bush tax cus (presumably legislatively, so I think that means they'd last forever) and the stripping away of the few social benefits you guys get in order to try to balance the budget. That will fail, and the American economy will get worse and worse (particularly given the presumed withdrawl of what little stimulus those social benefits provide in return for further tax cuts). Something bad will then happen - I'm not enough of an economist to know what that might be, but if America looks like potentially defaulting on even some of its debts, which is a medium/long-term prospect if nothing changes at the macroeconomic level... I don't even want to think about the economic fallout. Look what happened when it looked like Greece was going to fall over, a relatively minor player - the world shat its collective pants and things started to get very shaky on a global scale. And that is where it affects me. And **** that.
The White House needs to get its act together and start reminding some of the dumb**** americans who have forgotten who got them into this problem in the first place - the republicans. I have some faith that the democrats, if they stopped being massive pussies and actually fought for something, might be able to pull you lot out of the big hole you're in, but not if they can't make it into a second presidential term. And **** like this makes that less and less likely.

[StarSlayer]

To be honest I don't think Gitmo is going to be a major voting point come the next presidential election, the outcome really is going to hinge on,
as James Carville put it, "The economy, stupid"

[General Battuta]

Indeed, it always does.

[Topgun]

To anyone who believes that Obama wouldn't have won if he was white needs to remember how badly everyone hated republicans at the time.

[achtung]

I think he did this as a concession to the right. They've been refusing to cooperate on ANYTHING it seems.

[Mongoose]

I think he did this as a concession to the right. They've been refusing to cooperate on ANYTHING it seems.

The article states in no uncertain terms that there's strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to closing down Gitmo.  So while I'm certainly not condoning Obama's decision or the existence of Gitmo in general, it's not just him flip-flopping on his own stance in a complete political vacuum.

[Flipside]

It's the trade-off between Dictatorships and Democracies. In a Dictatorship, an idea comes out the same shape it went in, whereas in a Democracy, the idea gets beaten up along the way. The problem, and the strength, of a Dictatorship is that only one persons' opinion counts.

[Black Wolf]

I think he did this as a concession to the right. They've been refusing to cooperate on ANYTHING it seems.

The article states in no uncertain terms that there's strong bipartisan opposition in Congress to closing down Gitmo.  So while I'm certainly not condoning Obama's decision or the existence of Gitmo in general, it's not just him flip-flopping on his own stance in a complete political vacuum.

This is true, but the problem is that there are stupid people on the left and stupid people on the right. Neither will read the article or seek out the political nuance behind the decision. They'll just see  broken promise and that'll be that. The difference is that more of the stupid people on the right will stick with their chosen leaders through more ridiculous mistakes (see most of Bush's term and the republican victory in the election just 2 years later), whereas stupid lefties will get all huffy and probably refuse to vote.

Compulsory voting, seriously. You need it.

It's the trade-off between Dictatorships and Democracies. In a Dictatorship, an idea comes out the same shape it went in, whereas in a Democracy, the idea gets beaten up along the way. The problem, and the strength, of a Dictatorship is that only one persons' opinion counts.

I reckon it's got more to do with the whole setup of the American political system where the executive and the legislature get eleceted separately. In a parliament, the leader goes to the election with the party's platform, and if s/he wins, then there's both a mandate for him to enact those policies and a more or less cooperative legistative body. The upper house serves as a filter, sure, but I can't imagine, as an example, the senate or the house of lords simply saying "no" to something like this - an unequivocal campaign promise that clearly had a madate - if the prime minister was truly committed to seeing it through.

[SpardaSon21]

Compulsory voting, seriously. You need it.

No, we don't.  I'd much rather have apathetic and therefore disinterested voters sitting at home than casting apathetic and ill-informed votes.  Compulsory voting won't do anything to reduce voter apathy, which is the real issue.

I reckon it's got more to do with the whole setup of the American political system where the executive and the legislature get eleceted separately. In a parliament, the leader goes to the election with the party's platform, and if s/he wins, then there's both a mandate for him to enact those policies and a more or less cooperative legistative body. The upper house serves as a filter, sure, but I can't imagine, as an example, the senate or the house of lords simply saying "no" to something like this - an unequivocal campaign promise that clearly had a madate - if the prime minister was truly committed to seeing it through.

Checks and balances.  Having the legislative and executive at odds tends to gum up government, and therefore slowing down its unceasing intervention in our daily lives.

[Flipside]

Considering the UK is currently housing a Government that honestly couldn't give a **** about a single word they said before the election, maybe I'm just getting hardened to it, but I wasn't actually surprised to see this happen anyway.

I still think Contractual law should apply to election mandates

[Snail]

Well, if you say that they will of course use the excuse that it's a "coalition" government, but quite clearly the Lib Dems are just being repeatedly sodomized (at least that's how it looks).

[Flipside]

Well, if you say that they will of course use the excuse that it's a "coalition" government, but quite clearly the Lib Dems are just being repeatedly sodomized (at least that's how it looks).

Yup, the Cons are using them as a meat-shield for all the bad stuff, hence their humiliation in recent elections. Sad fact is, the real time for revenge, I think, will be the referendum on the Election System. I get the feeling the Lib-Dems won't get their way, the Conservatives don't want it, and they're making sure that the vote for Proportional Representation is more of a revenge vote against the Lib-Dems than any kind of real political statement.

Strange thing is, in UK law, a verbal contract is supposed to be binding if there are witnesses, and yet that law doesn't seem to apply to political agreements.

[redsniper]

I don't have particular transparency on the demographics of the detainees but I'll assume a goodly portion of them are not Joe **** the conscript that you can just send home and he goes back to farming poppy and thats that.  I figure that quite a few are real zeal and steel dyed in the wool bamf jihadists.  You cut them loose they're going to go back to the business of trying to attacking the West.  If they pose a clear danger to this nation's citizens what exactly do you propose we do with them other then keep them locked up?

You could handle them the same way we handle POWs except that kind of legitimizes them, so we don't want that. If they were captured in the US then we should just treat them like any other criminals. Put them in jail, have a trial, etc. I don't know for sure what the rules are for people captured abroad, but we should either follow them if we have some, or come up with some if we don't. What we shouldn't do is have some kind of limbo-prison, where we're allowed to do whatever the hell we want to people because of legal loopholes.

[Kosh]

lolchange 

OMG you believed him!?!

I'm not surprised. As soon as he started wavering on shutting the damn thing down I knew he was full of ****.

I am not sure how you were with that, but many, many people had a reverse racism effect... Obama wasn't a politician in their eyes but a black guy (who we wooowooo consider equal). It worked fantastically for him.

I wasn't so much that I believed in him, but more like it was the last shred of confidence and niave hope that stuff can get better.

[MP-Ryan]

*headdesk* x infinity...

Am I surprised?  No.  I figured the strategists would deconstruct Obama's ideological notions as soon as he walked through the White House door.

Am I disappointed?  Intensely.

Mid-hostilities or not, you've got one of two choices:  treat them as enemy combatants according to the Geneva conventions and afford them the rights thereof, OR treat them as terrorists and prosecute them to the full extent of the civilian law.  This quasi-hold-them-in-another-country-so-our-civil-protections-don't-apply bull**** SERIOUSLY undermines the credibility of the United States as a country serious about the international rule of law (the little credibility it had left after its failure to recognize the ICC and entry into Iraq without the support of the United Nations, but I digress).

For that matter, as enemy combatants out of uniform they can be summarily executed in the field, thus ending the problem of detention once and for all... HOWEVER, the collective intelligence apparatuses of the Western world don't want that as they are deprived of all the useful information they are sucking out of these scum of the Earth (and let's not kid ourselves, most of them ARE).

I understand that Obama is being a pragmatist and I'm usually all for pragmatic solutions, but sometimes, damn it, principles have got to count for something or they're pointless to even discuss.  I suppose you can't blame him too much, though, since the collective governments of the Western world are all basically complicit in this as we're all using the intelligence the Americans are obtaining.

[Topgun]

lol politicians with principles

[JCDNWarrior]

To anyone who believes that Obama wouldn't have won if he was white needs to remember how badly everyone hated republicans at the time.

They hated the Republicans, if i've seen it right, -because- of indefinite detention, illegal wars, and further spending, when George Bush ran election in 2000 mentioning he'd balance the budget, cut spending, obey constitution, and so on.

However at this point both parties are two sides of the same coin, as the policies just seem to continue without change.


Also, in the high-tech age where you could practically snoop on people from satellites or other means, gaining intelligence from the people sent to gitmo (many black-sites) seems like a very slow method.

However, by continuing the wars in those countries, and the many civilian casualties in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it wouldnt surprise me if Al Quaida (However its spelled) has a field-day in recruitment - What with all the resurgences of late. Doesnt seem like a good strategy to me.