The Letter

So I wrote a draft of the letter to Obama today. If you want to read it, here it is:
Dear Mr. President,
My name is [...] and I am a seventeen-year-old constituent who will be able to vote in the next presidential election. I am writing in regard to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. Approximately a year ago, you signed an executive order that you would close Guantanamo within a year. As you have acknowledged, this deadline has passed and Guantanamo Bay still isn’t closed.
I am requesting that you remain committed both to closing Guantanamo and to closing it properly through the judicial system. As I’m sure you are aware, the idea of infinite detention without a fair trial violates both due process and the very idea that our judicial system is based on- that a person is innocent until proven guilty.
Not only is Guantanamo a violation of American ideals, but it is also a danger to our national security. Our enemies are able to cite this as a reason to join the forces that wish to bring destruction to our country. This allows groups such as al Qaeda to point to us as a corrupt, bad nation rather than one with the high principles and ideals we take pride in.
Moreover, it is not enough to simply relocate prisoners or try them through military commissions- everyone deserves equal treatment under the law. By not trusting our federal court system to administer justice, we risk undermining its credibility. Any detainee who is not deemed fit to be released should be properly dealt with by our federal court system. If there is evidence that a detainee has broken the law, that detainee can be dealt with accordingly. If there is not, that detainee deserves to be returned to either her or his home country or the optimal country for that detainee.
I am requesting that you end the military commission system and commit to bringing the detainees through our federal courts. Furthermore, I would like it if you announced this plan publicly. I would greatly appreciate a response to:
[...]
Thank you so much for your time and the service that you do for our country.
Sincerely,
[...]

I'm Back!

So I deleted (more like hid, actually, but I digress) this blog for a while. Only now it's back. I mostly deleted it due to school stuff. But now that my level of school stress has been lowered (i.e. the semester's over, and I switched into honors world for second semester) I decided to put it back up. I'm still vegan, by the way. And I'm still working at the library. Not sure if anything about me has really changed since the last post...

So since I'm back, I'm going to jump right in and start talking about Gitmo. So it has been a year and two days since Obama promised that he would close Gitmo in a year (i.e. his deadline was two days ago and he missed it). And is it closed? Why of course not! (I may have become more critical of Obama since I last posted...). In fact, Obama has already decided to illegally detain without a trial FIFTY PEOPLE from Gitmo. Fifty.

So I've decided that tomorrow, I'm going to write a letter to him about how we need to close Gitmo. Some of my planned main points are as follows:
Infinite detention is a violation of due process and doesn't work with the idea of "innocent until proven guilty"
This actually hurts us to keep Gitmo open because you know those terrorists everyone's so afraid of? This is actually helping their recruitment efforts.
The justice system that we have (i.e. no military commissions) is perfectly able to deal with any of these people: if there's no evidence, the prisoners should be released and transferred to the appropriate country

And that's the gist of it. It's just ridiculous that even with a Democratic president, a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate, etc., we can't even manage to follow our own Constitution! And I also feel that Obama's hushing the whole Gitmo thing up. It feels like he's hoping everyone will just forget about it and that maybe he really doesn't have any interest in remedying the situation. And that scares me. Which is why I'm writing the letter.

Miscellaneous Details

I haven't posted anything this week, mostly because I've been extremely busy. My camp started (I'm basically a CIT) and it runs from 8 AM to 5 PM. Plus the bus ride takes a while. So I haven't had time to do much of anything else. Now it's the weekend, though, so I have more free time.

So this morning I was catching up on the news, etc, and I found it interesting that I didn't see much of anything about the whole prosecution thing. I think I'm taking that to mean that there definitely isn't any real investigation of the Bush administration about torture going on any time soon.
However, there's been a lot of work on healthcare that I was mostly unaware of this week due to my busy schedule. I've been having trouble finding too much detail on this, other than all the ridiculous claims the Republicans are throwing out. (Like this, for example). There may or may not be some willingness to just pass it without worrying about the Republicans, which would be good. I'll have to look around for more information later.

Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings have started. Apparently they have gone pretty well. It looks she'll be confirmed.

I seem to be unable to say anything much so I'll just link to some things. Think Progress points out that Obama should just issue an executive order preventing the further application of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which is a very good point. I don't understand why the Obama administration is acting like it can't really do anything. This piece of news about how the conservatives don't think civil rights leaders are important enough for students to learn about bothered me. This, about some of what Obama is doing with infinite detention, was troubling. This (about Obama's faith based initiatives thing) upset me, too.

Tentative Relief- Never mind

I'm assuming that anyone who reads this already knows that I really think that Bush and others who were responsible for the whole Guantanamo Bay situation really need to be prosecuted. If anyone didn't at the very least suspect this of me, I will be completely shocked. Well, lately I've been feeling disappointed and frustrated because it was looking like that wasn't going to happen. But luckily, there's some good news on this front!!!

Think Progress (not just Think Progress, but that's what I'm going to link to) is reporting that attorney general Holder is "leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate Bush admin's torture policies".

...Curses! So much for that! Look at this. Basically, he's only prosecuting interrogators who went beyond what the evil John Yoo did. ...If you're looking at the link, read through the whole thing: through update two. ...I almost didn't read that part.

Basically, information is very tentative at this point, but it looks like there will be an investigation so limited and so badly targetted that it would have been better not to have it at all. All of this is extremely discouraging, and what's truly awful is that it appears that Holder's trying to trick us or something. I'm most confused about all this.

Edit: For once my giant folder of politics-related bookmarks came in handy. A lot of websites don't have anything about this yet, and even fewer actually include the bit about the discouraging details. Sites that actually do have something about this include TalkLeft, ... and other than what I already linked to, that's it. Plus a few had the first bit, but the second part's kind of important. Hopefully all that means is that no one has managed to write anything about it yet.