Honestly what else is new? I voted for Obama on pledges he'd end the war in Iraq and close down the constitutional abomination that is Guantanamo. 8 years later and here we are.
" I voted for Obama on pledges he'd end the war in Iraq and close down the constitutional abomination that is Guantanamo. 8 years later and here we are."
Obama earnestly tried to close Guantanimo.
He's a lawyer, and should have known better.
Guantanimo is a geostrategic issue - that only 'looks like' a Constitutional problem.
The problem is there are some very, very bad people in Guantanimo - and putting them through the American justice system would not work. Obama figured this out.
Paradox:
1) US Servicement are subject to a different legal system than Americans - harsher in many ways - but Dems wanted to put terrorist on US soil, subjecting them to regular courts - it would have been a farce.
2) US Soldiers are not the FBI. They don't do fingerprints. The kinds of evidence/investigation required to convict someone in US courts (meant for citizens) ... the defense attorneys could have easily kicked out the cases against the terrorists.
3) Many of these terrorists were caught on the battlefield. They could have been killed there - and none would have been the wiser. A young Canadian, was caught attacking US servicemen - and killed a medic. He was shot in combat, and was dying. US Special Forces arrived and medivaced and then applied super USA field medical technology to save this 'terrorist'. Then he was held at Guantanimo - in a really odd legal situation.
He was just a kid, but many of these guys are really, really bad characters, caught on the battlefield.
They don't belong in the US justice system.
So they go to Guantanimo and stay in limbo.
If you ask me - many of them deserve it.
As for the 'regular combatants' - that's too bad - I wish where were some way to reintegrate them, I think it happened with some.
Anyhow - the realities of the situation hit Obama - and the above issues are far to explain to Dems in a populist manner.
Obama orders people to die in drones strikes. Not so 'peace and love eh'? He does it because he has to, and he knows it.
Obama's 1st term was pretty good.
2cnd term, he didn't accomplish much, that said, he did not have the power.
The point of justice is to avoid further crimes by rendering the criminal harmless, and by making an example out of them to scare away other potential criminals. What does 'deserving it' have to do with this, and how is it applicable? Do you think prisons exist out of resentment toward people?
"The point of justice is to avoid further crimes by rendering the criminal harmless,"
No. Or rather - 'criminal justice' as we understand it in the civil sense, does not apply here.
" What does 'deserving it' have to do with this, and how is it applicable? Do you think prisons exist out of resentment toward people?"
Some of the people in Guantanimo are terrorists of the worst kind. The people that planned 9/11. The kinds of people that chop off heads, who commit genocidal massacres, who grab little girls from families, rape them, and sell them into slavery.
Suppose one of these mass murdering criminals could be 're-integrated' into society, without much fuss, i.e. he sees the error of his ways, admits he was 'caught up in false jihad'. And we felt he could go back to a more stable part of Iraq and roughly go about his business? And we let him do that, and he pretty much behaved.
Would that be justice?
No.
99% of ex-Nazi SS-officers, after WW2, then one's that 'escaped' - went on to live relatively normal lives in hiding. They were 'reformed' essentially, and posed no threat to anyone. Their murderous activity was really in the context of WW2. Does that mean we let people who put people in the gas chamber go free?
No - some people deserve to die - and sometimes worse.
There are some kinds of 'bad people' that are either 'not reformable' or who have committed such grievous crimes such that 'true justice' is probably impossible.
I'm not advocating anything other than saying I have absolutely no sympathy for some of the people in Guantanimo.
Now - there are definitely some people there who were just 'villagers with guns, fighting for their village/community' whatever - and are not totalitarian, ideological, terrorists etc. - and sometimes that's a fine line, but clearly they don't belong there.
The 'injustice' is not the existence of Guantanimo, but simply our failure to apply 'actual justice' meaning some 'partly innocent' people are tangled up in a system designed for truly the most nefarious and evil types.
When we caught high ranking Nazi SS officers after WW2, we sentenced most of them to death. I suggest many ISIS fighters are far, far worse than SS officers.
Go ahead and watch the YouTube executions of thousands of Iraqi soldiers by ISIS after they took parts of Iraq. They were executed by the river, the river was literally running red with blood. I don't think that 'reform' is an issue that enters into one's mind when thinking about how to apply justice in those scenarios.
I appreciate that by enlarge, criminal justice should be focused on 'reform' but especially in these kinds of situations, it's really quite another reality.
I was in the (Canadian) Army a long time ago, and it was a difficult moral issue, but death is part of the equation. Think of this paradox: someone who has a gun and running from police, shooting back occasionally - will probably get a 'death sentence' on the street and that we generally accept. To think that mass murdering, genocidal people get more than that is a little disturbing.
Anyhow - I hope that we get better at separating the 'villagers with guns' from the 'genocidal terrorists'.
Many of those terrorists where farmers, who got sold out for a quick buck by neighbouring villages. And then met the chain of irresponsibility. Nobody wants to be responsible if the bad guy gets out, so the taxpayer pays for a cheap hotel the rest of their lives.
Not trying to defend the president (or anyone else), but - how else can one get elected? If voters carefully consider facts before voting then it makes sense for candidates to stick to facts and tell the truth and tell what is possible etc. But it doesn't happen, does it?
Democrats fully controlled Congress during President Obama's first two years in office. During this time he could have easily closed Gitmo, or addressed any of his other campaign promises. Instead we got the ACA, which is currently in its death throes irrespective of Trump.
Can someone explain why Americans hate ObamaCare? Here in the UK we have universal healthcare (the NHS) which all employed people pay for via a special tax (called National Insurance ,or NI) - isn't ObamaCare the same thing?
They are completely different. Obamacare has nothing do with universal healthcare in the UK sense, but is a complex system of mandates that dictates how private health insurance is bought and sold.
Very simply there are three key parts:
1) everybody (who doesn't for qualify other government programs) now has to have private health insurance that covers certain things. If they don't get this from their employer, they're responsible for buying it themselves.
2) The government sets minimum standards as to what insurance companies have to cover and regulate what premiums they can charge for this coverage. They also forbid insurance companies from denying people coverage due to pre-existing condition.
3) To make sure that people can afford these mandatory insurance policies, they offer heavy subsidies to people who earn less than a certain limit.
I support the goals of the ACA, but the law as written is a horrible hack which tries to implement a national health insurance system, without actually doing so or calling it that. It weaves together multiple semi-separate existing systems, adds in significant complexity and uses the threat of an income-tax penalty to try to get people to comply. The system only works well if it has broad subscription across healthy and unhealthy individuals, but as implemented many of the insurance pools are oversubscribed with unhealthy individuals, costing much more than the income to the plans can support.
In their attempts to lock in parts of the law so that an incoming shift of government couldn't easily change or repeal it, the Democrats hardcoded idiocies like a fixed date for the launch of the healthcare.gov website and features it had to have while leaving funding and development of the site a bit up in the air.
In a nominally functioning government, the ACA would have been a broad, general law laying out specific goals, requirements and mandates for compliance, delegating implementation and enforcement to a new or existing agency. But in the "regulations are bad, laws are good" environment in DC, processes and requirements which should have been regulations (which can be drawn up and vetted by a bureacracy under legislative supervision) ended up being in the actual law, which can only be changed by Congress and the President working together, which all but stopped after the 2010 midterm elections.
Add in the the Federal government is limited (by design) in what it can mandate individual States can do and you have this mess called Obamacare.
I don't support repealing it, I do support modifying it to make implementation more flexible, but that is almost certainly not going to happen under a Republican government.
Not at all. ObamaCare requires every citizen to enroll in an insurance plan. If your employer doesn't offer one, then you're stuck with going through your state's exchange. Here in California, the available plans either have outrageous monthly costs or outrageous deductibles.
There's an income tax penalty for each month you're uninsured, which eats into your tax returns. Last I checked, this penalty is still cheaper than actually paying for insurance.
Congress basically looked at the healthcare systems in Canada and Europe, looked at the existing healthcare system, took all the worst parts of both, and squished them together to make ObamaCare. Conservatives hate it because it's big government in action. Liberals hate it because it does absolutely nothing to fix the undue burden on individuals to pay for their own healthcare. It's a lose-lose proposition.
This. There's no actual incentive to cover yourself if you didn't like any of the options in the "marketplace", it's just that now you're taxed heavily for making that decision (and still not covered). While it may have helped force insurance companies to accept patients they wouldn't have otherwise, it also regressively taxed Americans who were already underserved by the market. "Too poor for health insurance? Here, have a kick in the teeth. You'll forget all about that back pain."
Obamacare also lets people under 26 stay on their parents health insurance longer, prevents insurance companies from dropping people from coverage or denying them coverage in the first case because of illness (yes, this used to be a thing in america, if you got cancer or some other disease that takes years of very expensive treatment to deal with your insurance company could just say "nah we're not paying for that" and drop you like a rock) and made health insurance affordable for millions of people who previously could not get it.
the affordable care act is far from perfect, but it's also not useless in any sense, and it needs to be modified not repealed. And yes I'm partially saying that because I and my brother will both lose and not be able to afford health insurance if it is repealed. I'm also saying that because I strongly belief in the benefits that have come out of the bill, even at the cost of some major downsides.
It's extremely different - in the UK, private healthcare exists at the margins and most is done through the NHS. Whereas in the US system it's all private: ObamaCare doesn't actually provide any care for people. There are no ObamaCare federal hospitals. At best I think it spends some federal money on subsidising some kinds of insurance?
It also includes mandatory purchasing of health insurance, which (while necessary to make a fully private system work) is philosophically objectionable to most people.
(The NHS is a fully state owned system that nonetheless has an internal market, which some commentators have called "playing at shops".)
" ObamaCare doesn't actually provide any care for people"
This is not true. Obamacare included a very large expansion of 'medicaid' which is more like single payer healthcare, i.e. 'government paid for / free healthcare'.
Proposals for a "single-payer" health care system like the NHS -- in which all citizens would pay into a single risk pool, which would cover most of their medical costs -- have been floated repeatedly in the US -- for example, as I recall, by Hillary Clinton during her husband's first term. They tend to be pretty popular with Democrats, AFAIK, but the Republicans have always bitterly opposed them.
The US actually has a single-payer health care system, called Medicare, for people 65 and older. It's wildly popular with the people who benefit from it, of both parties. It seems to be pretty well-run and to exert at least some useful downward pressure on costs. Extending it to all citizens doesn't seem like that big a leap to me. Of course it would all but obliterate the existing insurance industry, which has bought itself a lot of Congresscritters.
I think it would be a fascinating and hilarious irony if Trump came out supporting single-payer in the form of universal Medicare. I think the argument for having a single risk pool is very strong. And I don't see any other solution to the interlocking problems of containing costs (which are way out of hand here) and getting everyone insured.
Trump (whom I voted against, BTW) has shown he's not afraid to go against the Republican establishment. I think when he really looks at this problem he may come to this conclusion.
The first half of the first term. Republicans have controlled the House for the past 6 years.
Interesting, isn't it? Presidents aren't autocrats. The Republicans play obstructionist politics, the people get pissed off at a government that's not doing anything, and then blame the wrong party. The do-nothing government that the people have just voted against? It's the government they've just voted for...
