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.

Women's Equality Day

I haven't really had anything interesting to post lately, but I figured I should write something, given that apparently today is Women's Equality Day and all. Also, I finished reading Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions today, which reminded me to be annoyed that even now the ERA hasn't been passed. I find that rather frightening. This is kind of unrelated, but I'm posting a Gloria Steinem quote (from the book I just finished): "Women have always worked. If all the productive work of human maintenance that women do in the home were valued at its replacement cost, the gross national product of the United States would go up by 26 percent." I guess I'll just post some links relating to the occasion.

From Empowher
From The White House (the only thing that annoys me about this is that it acts like Women's Equality Day didn't used to exist until this year, which isn't true)
A new White House sub-website
From About
From the NWHP
From Wikipedia
From Jezebel

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.

More Slightly Impersonal Writing

My day was fairly dull today, and so I'm going to take this opportunity to post about some of the things I spend time thinking about. Yesterday I was writing more about feminism, so today I think I'll go with the war in Afghanistan. So, it should be very obvious that I'm opposed to the war in Iraq. I'm also opposed to the war in Afghanistan, though. As such, Obama's decision to intensify the war in Afghanistan concerns me.

First, though, I'm going to go into my reasoning. Clearly, my initial reason was that I'm essentially a pacifist. War is wrong: all it is is legalized murder. However, once I started learning about the war in Afghanistan in my NSL class and then researching it at home, I discovered that not only would the war in Afghanistan be morally wrong, but it would also be ineffective. It seems that our strategy is to storm into Afghanistan and kill all the terrorists. That's absurd, however. I mean, first of all it would be very, very difficult to even FIND all of them, what with the treacherous terrain and all. But it is also very counterproductive.

You see, the main reason that these people get away with terrorism is that many of the Afghani people support them. Basically, Afghanistan was a mess after various wars and the Taliban provided order and stability. The other way the Taliban get support is by setting themselves up as the positive alternative to the evil Western nations, particularly the US. And it works. The US is extremely easy to demonize. So, really, if we go in and start killing people, more people will become terrorists.

Another reason people turn to terrorism is that Afghanistan's economy is a mess. The main ways of getting any money are basically selling illegal drugs and terrorism. Naturally, starting a war wouldn't help their economy too much. What they need are things like schools, food, and a better economy. Not war. By going to war, we worsen the problem, and our own image, to the extent that it isn't already as bad as it could possibly be.

Even from a purely selfish standpoint it's stupid. Our own country's economy is such a wreck that we really don't need to go into more debt by starting pointless, counterproductive wars. So the war is very, very stupid.

One thing that perplexes me, though, is why on earth Obama supports the war. I mean, if it were Bush I would understand just to attribute it to stupidity. But Obama's smart. He's really smart. So why doesn't he get it?

Since I'm sure I've left things out, most notably the region's history (I'm not too great with world history, but hopefully I'll improve), I'm going to leave some lovely little links! And that was accidental alliteration. Really.

Rethink Afghanistan
http://www.peaceactionwest.org/
http://getafghanistanright.com/