President Obama to Continue Military Tribunals for GITMO Detainees

  The president has announced that he will continue the Bush administrations policy of trying GITMO detainees in military tribunals. This is a major reversal flip-flop from his campaign promise to end the tribunals and provide the GITMO detainees with rights under the United States constitution and try them in courts of law.

  It seems as though the longer that this president is in office, the more he realizes that the Bush administration was conducting the war on terror overseas contingency operation properly. Campaign rhetoric has been replaced with reality and the reality is that the president is continuing many of the Bush administration’s policies in regards to the war and the holding of prisoners.

  This is not sitting well with the far left who actually believed that this president would wave a magic wand  and end the war.

  Here is the statement released by Amnesty International:

President Obama is reinstating the same deeply-flawed military commissions that in June 2008 he called an ‘enormous failure.’ In one swift move, Obama both backtracks on a major campaign promise to change the way the United States fights terrorism and undermines the nation’s core respect for the rule of law by sacrificing due process for political expediency. Whatever revisions the Obama administration has made to the commissions do not change the fact that the commissions do not provide an adequate standard of justice for the detainees nor the victims of terrorism — they merely mock the U.S. Constitution, international laws and undermine fundamental human rights standards.

  What happened to President Obama’s confidence in the U.S. justice system’s ability to try detainees? He himself said that ‘we need not throw away 200 years of American jurisprudence while we fight terrorism.

U.S. federal courts are a perfectly sound system to try any and all detainees. They have brought other terror suspects to justice, and there is no reason why these courts cannot continue to do the same.

  Some harsh words there. The fact is that enemy combatants do not have the right to a trial by jury that the constitution grants the citizens of the United States. Military tribunals are the way that the detainees should be tried. Obviously someone in the administration has convinced the president that the Bush administration was correct.

  This probably has allot to do with the fact that this president has no idea what the hell to do with the GITMO detainees. He signed an executive order to close GITMO without considering what he was going to do with the terrorists being held there. Just two days ago he announced that he would hold the GITMO detainees indefinitely without a trial, another Bush policy that he campaigned against, and now I guess we know why.

  It appears as if the real world has interfered with the president’s Utopian, naive world view. Now he needs to convince the far left that he is doing the right thing by continuing the Bush administration’s policies that he was so hard on before he was elected.