Gitmo should have been shut down two decades ago. Torture, waterboarding, “advanced interrogation techniques” … don’t think we forgot about that. It’s a shame that no American president had the courage to close down dirty military institutions.
Stop. This is so fucked up. This has nothing to do with president’s of christmas past. This is the current president opening a concentration camp. Just stop with this false equivalence.
Edit: the both siders are really coming in in force now.
Edit2: It’s really sad after everything people would upvote this both sides bullshit. If we put kamala in the white house do you think there is even a 1% chance she would open a concentration camp at gitmo? 40+ people upvoted this propaganda and haven’t learned a god damn thing.
Dude, fascism didn’t spring into being fully formed out of nothing on the dawn of January 20th, just as the Roman Republic didn’t crumble in a day. It’s been decades and decades of baby steps towards this point, until we finally got to where things could get much worse all at once. Yeah, Kamala wouldn’t have made gitmo into a concentration camp, but she wouldn’t have dismantled the machinery built by the war on terror and the war on drugs that the fascists are using right now. Let’s not oversell it; at best, she would’ve kicked the can down the road another four years. Our past leaders all had chances and made commitments to close gitmo, and they had the perfect authority to do so, and then decided that they could wield the tools of fascism wisely rather than destroying them so that a future fascist wouldn’t have them just laying around.
Yes, I am against concentration camps, I just wish that our previous decades of leadership had been too. If we’re going to do accountability, let’s do accountability.
Okay, real talk, human being to human being. Things are bad enough as it is. You’re clearly not happy. I saw elsewhere that you said you’ve been trolled since 1 am, and that’s a super shitty sounding feeling. I release you from any charge to respond, you win the argument. Why don’t you take a break, go get some sunshine, drink your favorite hot drink, and call or text a friend, maybe one you haven’t spoken to in a while? Take care of yourself, take a break from social, come back if you want to when you’re feeling better.
You had 2 Democratic presidents since it opened. It’s a legitimate criticism. Trump is using existing infrastructure that could’ve been dismantled.
Same with the patriot act and surveillance state: the thing that we warned everyone about is going to happen: the President has a ridiculous amount of power that is going to be abused (even more) now. But the bipartisan consensus was that terrorism was worth giving up your rights and privacy for.
Just telling it like it is. You had the opportunity to close gitmo if you did more and you let it pass through your hands. It’s like you personally put the concentration camp there.
I have no idea what you’re trying to argue with me about, but sure. Whatever you say. All I was saying was that I have thought about Gitmo plenty of times in the last 20 years. Especially all the times that you apparently never noticed that politicians claimed they were going to close it and then went back on their word.
Wow, thank you. We’ve done exactly what we should in this moment of deprivation. We looked to the past and blamed a black man while throwing up our hands saying, “nothing can be done.”
Well done everyone. Good job. Really pulled through on this one. Thought we might be against concentration camps but how stupid am I to not forsee that the democrats did or didnt do something and now that’s all that matters.
It’s important that while we are looking for solutions for the now that we also reflect on how it could have been prevented. If this is burned into our memories, maybe next time someone that represents us gains power we’ll force them to prevent something similar from happening again in the future.
You’re assuming that critics of Democrats didn’t vote for Democrats. The election is over. I don’t have to worry about swinging any votes by airing my grievances.
Got it your living in a fantasy land. It would a lot more difficult to expand something that no longer exists. Enjoy your team politics and not holding anyone accountable for anything.
If we put kamala in the white house do you think there is even a 1% chance she would open a concentration camp at gitmo?
I believe that having the choice to either expand gitmo, close gitmo, or do nothing and leave it for the next republican to deal with, she would choose to do nothing about it, which is still better then Trump and why I voted for her, but it was a depressing vote. She is not more progressive then Obama and Obama did not close gitmo. You don’t gently wine down Auschwitz.
I was excited when Obama won and would close gitmo. I was hopeful that Biden would have a huge program to reunite the separated families. I begrudgingly voted for the cop that the DNC thought was a good idea after months of BLM protests. I’m burnt out now.
Gitmo was never an immigrant holding cell before for holding innocent individuals and families. Even if it didn’t exist Trump would have found some other place to set it up. Gitmo existing or not has nothing to do with anything.
Kind of jumping into the middle of yours and his here, but quite frankly the ghosts of our past are ALWAYS relevant and pretending things should be changed or answered for in the bubble of “here and now” does no good when anticipating the effects down the line. Torture has been shown to be ineffective and counterproductive. Many voters opposed Citizens United, yet it was passed under Obama. Many citizens opposed the Patriot Act, citing it’s opportunity to be misused to indefinitely hold people. And sure enough Bush signed it and we are still dealing with the repurcussions.
Both Obama AND Biden ran on the platform to close Guantanamo so it could not be misused, and did not. Could Trump have reopened it? Sure! But then we’d be faulting him for reopening it AND using it as a camp. It’s not “both sides nonsense” to say that if Obama had succeeded in it before he left office, we wouldn’t be in this position. (The earliest I could find with quick Google) He stated as early as 2009 in a press release he aimed to do so, and had 7 years after that to get the votes together, ultimately handing it off to Trump in 2016 with 0 inmates because he failed to get a vote to approve it. Trump didn’t close it for obvious reasons, and then Biden had 4 years to take his crack at it and also failed to close it. And now, here we sit almost 20 years later with bushes prison island still open, being used for the same evil bush used it for - hiding people from the press so those nasty headlines stop because they can’t access the island.
Their platform was not, “I will close gitmo”. Maybe somewhere in the parties platform it was in there but that is not what they ran on and quit trying to rewrite history.
I’m not going to sit here and argue semantics with bad actors trying to obfuscate Americas plunge into fascism. I just want you all to know, you guys are disgusting.
It’s not semantics it’s literally cause and effect. In the initial post YOU replied to, they simply stated that if preventative maintenance had been done we would not be having to ask “what reaction is appropriate” so soon. I know YOU’RE looking for answers to the OP, but then you replied to someone simply bemoaning that we could have been better.
Obviously, at this stage no one is really sure what to do. Is the US really sliding into New Nazi Germany? To what degree? What is a proportionate response to any level? Should anyone actually do anything or will the government sort itself out? Remember, 49% of the voting base DID vote for him, as much as you or I disagree with them. To use violence against someone who is, at this stage, still a democratically elected leader, would be fair game to put anyone in prison. That’s the catch-22 of the issue - he’s still fairly elected, but as soon as the declaration of the formation of the first Galactic Empire, you’re already too late.
If someone DID react, what do you do? Peacefully- Strike at work? Block road/railways? Stand in the doorway of trump-aligned businesses? Or escalate into violence- Burn buildings? Which ones? Even further - Does every city devolve into street warfare like Mogadishu in 1993?
Cause and effect. What happens if you do the peaceful things? The violent ones? Will people follow your peaceful resistance and risk their jobs for your cause? Will people follow your violent warpath, and risk their lives for your cause? What happens to them if they do either, or do nothing and ignore you? These are the questions you ask not “well why is everyone bitching about black man sucks”. - not because powerful funny black man sucks, but because his inaction has us asking all the questions above so much sooner than anyone would have liked.
Over turning Bush II’s policies were the primary reason I voted for Obama. Since then, I’ve only depressingly voted for democrats on the basis that they would at least slow the rise of fascism.
This isn’t “both sides”, but if we couldn’t get gitmo closed with democrats, how could we do it with bold faced fascists?
I mean, Biden did at least manage to get it down to just 15 inmates. Which isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty fucking good.
And I’m pretty fucking tired of people voting in Republicans who fuck things over royally, vote in Democrats to fix things, then vote Democrats out because they didn’t fix things fast enough. It takes a hell of a lot more time and effort to build and repair things than it does to blow them up in the first place. What’s that saying: Republicans get to be lawless while Democrats have to be flawless. Eff that shit.
And I’m tired of not being allowed to criticize democrats just because republicans are worse. I still voted for them. I should be allowed to criticize and pressure them to do better. Politicians wont do better unless you’re constantly on their ass.
Exactly. 15 people in Gitmo is still a moral stain on the nation, but at least some semblance of progress was made. Not fast enough, still terrible, etc.
Trump is vowing to make that - just numerically - 2,000 times worse than the current numbers. And that’s just looking at raw numbers, not even getting into the ethics of the people themselves (do we really think they’ll be even half as rigorous as the shit level of rigor for former/current prisoners if they’re trying to capture thirty thousand people?).
Oh, so the expectation was always that a authoritarian was going to seize control of the federal government and open a concentration camp there? Funny, cause I never heard that argument but, yeah, sure, completely salient now.
Yes, actually. Edward Snowden risked hanging for treason by leaking the NSA mass surveillance program for just this reason. He’s the last true patriot, imo, and I wish he’d stayed and made the government take him to trial over their blatantly illegal program instead of ending up as a trophy on Putin’s shelf.
Bush II was already fascist and used gitmo for exactly that. It’s specifically outside the US border so they can make an argument that American civil rights laws don’t apply there. At the very least, press and public can’t reach it.
People were screaming from the top of their lungs about this exact scenario. Yes, this was expected and we cared too much about the economy to care.
Again, this is a false equivalence. Show me where bush II staged a coup. I have no love for the man but it’s entirely irrelevant to what is happening today.
Oh so as long as people aren’t open and proud about it, you’re fine with thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis being raped and tortured by Uncle Sam.
Good to know the only real problem here for you is the rhetoric.
You’re talking like it hasn’t always been a concentration camp. If liberals bothered to hold their own people accountable and have an actual red line that couldn’t be crossed, someone like Trump could have never made it into office.
The most gitmo ever held was maybe 700-800 people. Trumps talking 30000. Just because it’s a building and war crimes are done there doesn’t mean it’s a concentration camp.
If one person is being unjustly denied their right to freedom under law it’s just as bad as if 30000 are being denied their right to freedom under the law.
How many people has Donald Trump had tortured…so far? His crimes still pale in comparison to George W Bush, who should have been hanged by the neck until dead as the war criminal he is.
Gitmo should have been shut down two decades ago. Torture, waterboarding, “advanced interrogation techniques” … don’t think we forgot about that. It’s a shame that no American president had the courage to close down dirty military institutions.
You would prob enjoy Jon Stewart’s “is this fascism?” video.
Its like having a permenant place nobody ever looks at with no rules.
Way too convienient to get rid of.
Probably more a decision of the intelligence communities more than the military.
Stop. This is so fucked up. This has nothing to do with president’s of christmas past. This is the current president opening a concentration camp. Just stop with this false equivalence.
Edit: the both siders are really coming in in force now.
Edit2: It’s really sad after everything people would upvote this both sides bullshit. If we put kamala in the white house do you think there is even a 1% chance she would open a concentration camp at gitmo? 40+ people upvoted this propaganda and haven’t learned a god damn thing.
Dude, fascism didn’t spring into being fully formed out of nothing on the dawn of January 20th, just as the Roman Republic didn’t crumble in a day. It’s been decades and decades of baby steps towards this point, until we finally got to where things could get much worse all at once. Yeah, Kamala wouldn’t have made gitmo into a concentration camp, but she wouldn’t have dismantled the machinery built by the war on terror and the war on drugs that the fascists are using right now. Let’s not oversell it; at best, she would’ve kicked the can down the road another four years. Our past leaders all had chances and made commitments to close gitmo, and they had the perfect authority to do so, and then decided that they could wield the tools of fascism wisely rather than destroying them so that a future fascist wouldn’t have them just laying around.
Yes, I am against concentration camps, I just wish that our previous decades of leadership had been too. If we’re going to do accountability, let’s do accountability.
… keep wishing in one hand and shit in the other.
Okay, real talk, human being to human being. Things are bad enough as it is. You’re clearly not happy. I saw elsewhere that you said you’ve been trolled since 1 am, and that’s a super shitty sounding feeling. I release you from any charge to respond, you win the argument. Why don’t you take a break, go get some sunshine, drink your favorite hot drink, and call or text a friend, maybe one you haven’t spoken to in a while? Take care of yourself, take a break from social, come back if you want to when you’re feeling better.
You had 2 Democratic presidents since it opened. It’s a legitimate criticism. Trump is using existing infrastructure that could’ve been dismantled.
Same with the patriot act and surveillance state: the thing that we warned everyone about is going to happen: the President has a ridiculous amount of power that is going to be abused (even more) now. But the bipartisan consensus was that terrorism was worth giving up your rights and privacy for.
Thanks captain hindsight. You’re probably the only person who’s thought about gitmo in the last 20 years.
No, there’s at least two of us.
Did you know your inaction on the matter resulted in trump opening concentration camps. Good job.
What are you even talking about now?
Just telling it like it is. You had the opportunity to close gitmo if you did more and you let it pass through your hands. It’s like you personally put the concentration camp there.
I have no idea what you’re trying to argue with me about, but sure. Whatever you say. All I was saying was that I have thought about Gitmo plenty of times in the last 20 years. Especially all the times that you apparently never noticed that politicians claimed they were going to close it and then went back on their word.
https://youtu.be/RnOTltjungo
Wow, thank you. We’ve done exactly what we should in this moment of deprivation. We looked to the past and blamed a black man while throwing up our hands saying, “nothing can be done.”
Well done everyone. Good job. Really pulled through on this one. Thought we might be against concentration camps but how stupid am I to not forsee that the democrats did or didnt do something and now that’s all that matters.
PM me if you’d like to know how I really feel.
It’s important that while we are looking for solutions for the now that we also reflect on how it could have been prevented. If this is burned into our memories, maybe next time someone that represents us gains power we’ll force them to prevent something similar from happening again in the future.
Bitch please. If trump didn’t have gitmo it would be some other place. Yes, gitmo is convenient but you stop nothing by removing it from the board.
So fucking ignorant.
How about this, you don’t want concentration camps, vote for the person who isn’t openly fash.
You’re assuming that critics of Democrats didn’t vote for Democrats. The election is over. I don’t have to worry about swinging any votes by airing my grievances.
Got it your living in a fantasy land. It would a lot more difficult to expand something that no longer exists. Enjoy your team politics and not holding anyone accountable for anything.
I believe that having the choice to either expand gitmo, close gitmo, or do nothing and leave it for the next republican to deal with, she would choose to do nothing about it, which is still better then Trump and why I voted for her, but it was a depressing vote. She is not more progressive then Obama and Obama did not close gitmo. You don’t gently wine down Auschwitz.
I was excited when Obama won and would close gitmo. I was hopeful that Biden would have a huge program to reunite the separated families. I begrudgingly voted for the cop that the DNC thought was a good idea after months of BLM protests. I’m burnt out now.
Gitmo was never an immigrant holding cell before for holding innocent individuals and families. Even if it didn’t exist Trump would have found some other place to set it up. Gitmo existing or not has nothing to do with anything.
Kind of jumping into the middle of yours and his here, but quite frankly the ghosts of our past are ALWAYS relevant and pretending things should be changed or answered for in the bubble of “here and now” does no good when anticipating the effects down the line. Torture has been shown to be ineffective and counterproductive. Many voters opposed Citizens United, yet it was passed under Obama. Many citizens opposed the Patriot Act, citing it’s opportunity to be misused to indefinitely hold people. And sure enough Bush signed it and we are still dealing with the repurcussions.
Both Obama AND Biden ran on the platform to close Guantanamo so it could not be misused, and did not. Could Trump have reopened it? Sure! But then we’d be faulting him for reopening it AND using it as a camp. It’s not “both sides nonsense” to say that if Obama had succeeded in it before he left office, we wouldn’t be in this position. (The earliest I could find with quick Google) He stated as early as 2009 in a press release he aimed to do so, and had 7 years after that to get the votes together, ultimately handing it off to Trump in 2016 with 0 inmates because he failed to get a vote to approve it. Trump didn’t close it for obvious reasons, and then Biden had 4 years to take his crack at it and also failed to close it. And now, here we sit almost 20 years later with bushes prison island still open, being used for the same evil bush used it for - hiding people from the press so those nasty headlines stop because they can’t access the island.
Their platform was not, “I will close gitmo”. Maybe somewhere in the parties platform it was in there but that is not what they ran on and quit trying to rewrite history.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13492 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2016/02/23/president-obamas-plan-close-Guantanamo-about-closing-chapter-history
Google isn’t hard to use.
I’m not going to sit here and argue semantics with bad actors trying to obfuscate Americas plunge into fascism. I just want you all to know, you guys are disgusting.
PM if you want to know how I really feel.
It’s not semantics it’s literally cause and effect. In the initial post YOU replied to, they simply stated that if preventative maintenance had been done we would not be having to ask “what reaction is appropriate” so soon. I know YOU’RE looking for answers to the OP, but then you replied to someone simply bemoaning that we could have been better.
Obviously, at this stage no one is really sure what to do. Is the US really sliding into New Nazi Germany? To what degree? What is a proportionate response to any level? Should anyone actually do anything or will the government sort itself out? Remember, 49% of the voting base DID vote for him, as much as you or I disagree with them. To use violence against someone who is, at this stage, still a democratically elected leader, would be fair game to put anyone in prison. That’s the catch-22 of the issue - he’s still fairly elected, but as soon as the declaration of the formation of the first Galactic Empire, you’re already too late.
If someone DID react, what do you do? Peacefully- Strike at work? Block road/railways? Stand in the doorway of trump-aligned businesses? Or escalate into violence- Burn buildings? Which ones? Even further - Does every city devolve into street warfare like Mogadishu in 1993?
Cause and effect. What happens if you do the peaceful things? The violent ones? Will people follow your peaceful resistance and risk their jobs for your cause? Will people follow your violent warpath, and risk their lives for your cause? What happens to them if they do either, or do nothing and ignore you? These are the questions you ask not “well why is everyone bitching about black man sucks”. - not because powerful funny black man sucks, but because his inaction has us asking all the questions above so much sooner than anyone would have liked.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/24/obama-guantanamo-bay-closure-republicans
It was definitely something he ran on, and Obama even signed an executive order to do it.
Over turning Bush II’s policies were the primary reason I voted for Obama. Since then, I’ve only depressingly voted for democrats on the basis that they would at least slow the rise of fascism.
This isn’t “both sides”, but if we couldn’t get gitmo closed with democrats, how could we do it with bold faced fascists?
I mean, Biden did at least manage to get it down to just 15 inmates. Which isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty fucking good.
And I’m pretty fucking tired of people voting in Republicans who fuck things over royally, vote in Democrats to fix things, then vote Democrats out because they didn’t fix things fast enough. It takes a hell of a lot more time and effort to build and repair things than it does to blow them up in the first place. What’s that saying: Republicans get to be lawless while Democrats have to be flawless. Eff that shit.
And I’m tired of not being allowed to criticize democrats just because republicans are worse. I still voted for them. I should be allowed to criticize and pressure them to do better. Politicians wont do better unless you’re constantly on their ass.
I didn’t know Biden got it down to just 15. That was a big improvement
Exactly. 15 people in Gitmo is still a moral stain on the nation, but at least some semblance of progress was made. Not fast enough, still terrible, etc.
Trump is vowing to make that - just numerically - 2,000 times worse than the current numbers. And that’s just looking at raw numbers, not even getting into the ethics of the people themselves (do we really think they’ll be even half as rigorous as the shit level of rigor for former/current prisoners if they’re trying to capture thirty thousand people?).
Oh, so the expectation was always that a authoritarian was going to seize control of the federal government and open a concentration camp there? Funny, cause I never heard that argument but, yeah, sure, completely salient now.
Yes, actually. Edward Snowden risked hanging for treason by leaking the NSA mass surveillance program for just this reason. He’s the last true patriot, imo, and I wish he’d stayed and made the government take him to trial over their blatantly illegal program instead of ending up as a trophy on Putin’s shelf.
Again, not playing your fuck fuck game.
Bush II was already fascist and used gitmo for exactly that. It’s specifically outside the US border so they can make an argument that American civil rights laws don’t apply there. At the very least, press and public can’t reach it.
People were screaming from the top of their lungs about this exact scenario. Yes, this was expected and we cared too much about the economy to care.
Again, this is a false equivalence. Show me where bush II staged a coup. I have no love for the man but it’s entirely irrelevant to what is happening today.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/10/timeline-20-years-of-guantanamo-bay-prison
Show me on the timeline where, “people screamed at the top of their lungs” that gitmo would be repurposed to open concentration camps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/politics/brooks-brothers-riot-trump-what-matters/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
This shit has been a slow boil since Bush II or even Goldwater.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
2000 was a judicial coup dawg
You really don’t understand what false equivalence is and frankly I can’t teach you if you haven’t caught on yet.
Oh so as long as people aren’t open and proud about it, you’re fine with thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis being raped and tortured by Uncle Sam.
Good to know the only real problem here for you is the rhetoric.
What you’re saying right now is rhetoric. I have never been for gitmo, and you fucking know that. Gtfo with you lecturing anyone about rhetoric.
It’s not rhetoric. It’s what you’re saying by attacking those critical of GitMo pre-Trump.
GitMo is a crime against humanity and is the site of abject abuses and horrors. All presidents have failed to deal with this disgrace.
You’re talking like it hasn’t always been a concentration camp. If liberals bothered to hold their own people accountable and have an actual red line that couldn’t be crossed, someone like Trump could have never made it into office.
The most gitmo ever held was maybe 700-800 people. Trumps talking 30000. Just because it’s a building and war crimes are done there doesn’t mean it’s a concentration camp.
People are still being held there, with no due process for over 20 years.
1 person being held with no due process is as bad as 30000.
Liberals and their fucking trump derangement syndrome keep fighting the wrong things.
Please explain this one to me, because I’m not understanding your math.
If one person is being unjustly denied their right to freedom under law it’s just as bad as if 30000 are being denied their right to freedom under the law.
How many people has Donald Trump had tortured…so far? His crimes still pale in comparison to George W Bush, who should have been hanged by the neck until dead as the war criminal he is.
Ok?