Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, December 30, 2008 10:00:49 AM
Media changes course, worried now about letting Gitmo maniacs go free
"What would you have done with them?" Gordon
said. "These are enemy combatants who wish to do harm to the United
States. Our government has an obligation to protect the public."
Others do not believe the Pentagon or the Bush administration when they call these men a threat.
"We simply cannot take any of the
administration's claims as true," said Air Force Maj. David Frakt, a
defense lawyer who represents Guantanamo detainees.
Frakt said many people who attend training camps
or join jihadist movements do so sometimes to show solidarity with
oppressed Muslims.
Retired Army major general John Altenburg, who
once oversaw the Guantanamo cases for the Pentagon, said those reviews
are "unprecedented" in war.
"In any other country, in any other place, they
wouldn't be bothering to make that determination," Altenburg said.
"They would just say, 'We've detained them legally and we can hold
them.' "
Davis said the U.S. would be enraged if one of
its soldiers were held under such conditions. But the Bush
administration has said that U.S. soldiers are entitled to special
treatment as prisoners of war because they follow the rules of war.
They wear uniforms and answer to a command structure and a nation.
Those in Guantanamo are not soldiers but terrorists who violate the
rules of war by pretending to be civilians and targeting civilians, it
says.
Altenburg said no matter the debate, the global
war on terror will not end with the Bush administration and Obama will
need to figure out what to do with captives in this war.
"We can detain people that we apprehend in that
war as long as the war is still going on," he said. "That may be 10 or
20 years."