Matt Davies for May 11, 2013

Aaaaaaand just a little more irony from our friends on the Right as they dip their bags in Medicare prescribed tea.

Oh, Oh !!! My heart! I have been cut ! To the quick !! Such a rapier-like wit ! However will my poor ego manage to survive such an emotionally damaging cut?

Probably by thinking Ms.Ima isn’t enjoying her mother’s basement and probably isn’t even a Ms.

This is where the divide begins. A failure to trust anyone in gov’t who isn’t saying what you want to hear. He doesn’t trust big gov’t, but he does trust enough of the people that are part of big gov’t that he can pick and choose what he wants to believe.And both sides do it.And while legislators and their donor divide us, we ignore them as they create no jobs, repair no infrastructure, and pass no laws that apparently don’t directly effect them.This is not gov’t for the people, or by the people. This is an oligarchy, rule by the few on behalf of the few.Respectfully,C.

Thanks for demonstrating so clearly the pig-ignorance being lampooned in this cartoon. Conservatives really ARE idiots with no logic or thinking skills!

Grated, Cheney or Reagan would have broken the law and closed Gitmo using “Executive privelege.” The problem is that Obama actually respects the constitution. He wants GItmo closed, but congress has made it illegal. I don’t see any big conspiracy here. He DOES keep asking for the legal right to close it.

Don’t be an idiot. The ones who have been released (and there are a few, including some UK citizens) have really, really wanted to go home and see their families.

Law Professor Mark Denbeaux, his lawyer son Joshua Denbeaux and a number of law students from Seton Hall University School of Law (where Mark is a professor) took on the arduous task of compiling the information from the military reports and organizing it. Here is what the military’s own documents have to say about where these men were apprehended: Only five percent of the prisoners were picked up by U.S. forces, 86 % of the men were arrested and turned over to the U.S. forces by the Pakistani’s or the Northern Alliance. According to the Seton Hall report "This 86% of the detainees captured by Pakistan or the Northern Alliance were handed over to the United States at a time in which the United States offered large bounties for the capture of suspected enemies. " (Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf admitted in his “kiss and tell” book last year that the Pakistani government made millions of dollars turning over Arab’s to the U.S. during that time period.) Only 8% of detainees are characterized as al Qaeda fighters and 60% are held because they are “associated with” groups the government asserts are terrorist organizations (though only 8% are identified as “fighters” for any group). And as for the “terrorist organizations” that these men are accused of being “associated with” the Denbeauxs released a second report again using the governments own data and analyzed the 72 organizations with which the detainees are purportedly affiliated. The groups were identified by the Department of Defense (DOD) in the CSRT data, and the Denbeauxs cross-checked those groups against the State Department Designated and Other Foreign Terrorist Organizations Lists and the Patriot Act Terrorist Exclusion List (intended to be used to exclude terrorists from the United States). The Denbeauxs report found that fully 52 of the groups on the DOD list, or 72%, are not on either of the other two lists, while 18% of the groups are on one of the two lists, but not both. What this means is that we are holding men in Guantánamo because they are “associated” with groups whose members we allow to freely travel in the U.S..

“So, Matt thinks those guys were just picked up at random and sent to Gitmo. That’s the problem with liberals, they are delusional.”Many of them were captured by Afghanis & sold to the CIA for a bounty. There were more than a few who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Aside the screams from “the right” anytime closing Gitmo and moving the prisoners (any actually guilty ones) to mainland prisons is mentioned, the REAL reason Obama has not done a number of things relative to the previous administration’s actions are the same as Gerald Ford’s rationale for pardoning Nixon. If all the illegal actions were again brought out, and made formally “recognized” the court in Den Hague would have even more reason to indict Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith Woflowitz, Rice, et al, and many would face prosecution for crimes against U.S. law, and violations of the Constitution too numerous to mention.

Welcome back, Genome.SalutesC.

Has the US come to this? Keeping people incarcerated indefinitely even if they are never charged, let alone convicted? Reminds me of the Ancien Regime.

“And why would you think “anyone” unjustly held in Gitmo would respect any American.. ever. Sadly the only solution is to hold them till they die.. and hope their relatives have forgotten.”

I don’t actually see this as a useful tactic.

How long would it take for you to forget?

Better to send them home. Anything else really is a travesty. Certainly the ones who were fingered by foreign governments without evidence.

Davies has captured the right wing pin-head perfectly.

Amazing the difference in view of those “rice farmers” in black pajamas who WON against the U.S. invasion of their country! Yes, the NVA had uniforms, sometimes, so of course that was different. Fact remains, “civil wars” are nasty things the U.S. should stay out of , like the right-wing push for more involvement in Syria.

As to invading other countries where neither the governments, nor the citizens, did anything against us, is an even dumber idea, but don’t tell the “don’t blame Bush crowd”.