Last night, on his TV show, O'Reilly said he was in favor of closing Gitmo because, he said, the prisoners at Gitmo had not received trials.
Sorry about that Bill. Those prisoners are in Gitmo because they were bearing arms against US forces. They were captured on a foreign battlefield. We are holding them in Gitmo to prevent them from continuing to fight against us. They are prisoners of war, not convicted criminals. No American court, court-martial, or special commission is going to convict them of crimes when all they did was fight against us. Back right after 9/11 we took prisoners alive. They are clearly enemy, clearly hostile, and unless we snuff 'em, we gotta put 'em somewhere. They are not criminals, they are enemy soldiers (enemy combatants the politically correct jargon used today).
The only reason we don't call them prisoners of war, is that the Geneva Conventions give prisoners of war a fair number of protections that we don't want to grant these guys. Geneva Conventions prohibit grilling POW's for intelligence. We grilled everyone sent to Gitmo until they were medium rare.
Obama (and O'Reilly) want to close Gitmo for who knows what reason[s]. The result is we don't take prisoners much anymore. We kill them with Predator drone strikes, or we shoot 'em right in the lips, like we did to Osama Bin Laden.
Which was a mistake. Bin Laden knew a lotta things that we need to know, and a nice long interrogation session at Gitmo would have given us a lot of good intel. Plus we could have run off a nice show trial. Bin Laden in an orange jumpsuit and shiny handcuffs, a long parade of tearful victims testifying against him, would go a long way to convincing the world that Bin Laden really was a nogoodnick rather than a martyr. .
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