Criminals Out Of Our Country

[Earth Bound Misfit]

Run time: 01:01 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ah7wKhvgvo   Posted on YouTube: May 07, 2009 By YouTube Member: Views on YouTube: 0   Posted on DU: May 07, 2009 By DU Member: Earth Bound Misfit Views on DU: 629

 
hilzoy from obsidianwings made this video in response to the GOP GITMO fearmongering videos, with the following comment:

Something about 9/11 seems to have produced a kind of amnesia among some people on the right. It's as though they think that we have never before had to figure out such questions as: how can we hold dangerous people in detention safely? When someone has served his time and we think he might go on to do something bad, how might we monitor him to ensure that he doesn't? Suppose we have captured someone who might be guilty of a violent crime, but we do not have enough evidence to charge him: what should we do?


These are not problems that we confronted for the first time after 9/11. They have been with us from the founding of our country. We somehow managed to face down the world's most powerful empire, survive a brutal civil war, defeat Hitler, and live for about forty years with an immense arsenal of thermonuclear weapons pointed at our cities, and do all that without giving up on the rule of law. But let nineteen guys with boxcutters fly planes into our buildings and, apparently, we face a Brand New Existential Threat that causes our entire legal history to fly out of our collective heads.


To explain this point, and to prove that I too can make a movie with Carl Orff's 'O Fortuna' as the soundtrack, I present my own YouTube. (It's the first time I've ever made a movie. Be gentle.)

[GTurck]

1. You have found a powerful way...

to express what most of us forget. We have prisons in every state, every county, and most cities and there are violent people in all of them. Somehow most of them are held safely away from the people that they would do harm to so what is the difference if the truly violent at Gitmo are put into some prison in the U.S.?
Sen. Pat Roberts said he would shut down the Senate this summer if the Gitmo detainees are sent to Kansas; Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary to be exact. Note that is a FEDERAL prison not one administered by the state of Kansas. They'll take federal money though to have that prison in their midst.
It truly boggles the mind how these people think and think we think like they do. Frankly I left wonderland over 60 years ago and don't want to go back. Gitmo must be closed and those that must be detained should be in a place where U. S. laws and mores still apply.

[JDPriestly]

2. Somehow, I think the most dangerous of the Gitmo prisoners

will probably stay longer and be less likely to get out of American prisons than prisons elsewhere in the world.

[iscooterliberally]

3. To paraphrase Jon Stewart...

..from a couple of weeks ago - "When it comes to locking people up, WE'RE NUMBER ONE!" We have more people in prison than China does, and we're supposed to be a free country? I like your video. Thanks!!