Tag: Gitmo
President Obama and the Guantanamo Heckler
Hecklers of speeches — especially major ones — aren’t new. A public disruption of a speaker is meant as an attempt to embarrass the speaker and get attention for the heckler and the heckler’s cause. Yesterday, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink attended the President’s speech at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair yesterday and proceeded to heckle him 3 times during the speech. The video below (approx 8 minutes long and I apologize for the commercial) shows that segment of the President’s speech. I couldn’t hear everything she said, but it seems clear to me that she was calling for the immediate release of some number of the Gitmo prisoners. While the President was proposing a new plan to close Gitmo. What is fascinating to me about this clip is the President’s reaction to Ms. Benjamin’s interruptions. Not only did he appear to be listening to her, but he validated her concerns (or some of them) as important and worth listening to. I can’t imagine GWB managing this kind of respect towards someone yelling at him, and whoever was yelling at him would have been immediately hustled away from the event — not given two more times to disrupt. I haven’t had a chance to see the entire speech to know what exactly the President said, so I’m not here agreeing or disagreeing with what he proposed yesterday. But I am pretty proud of the way he handled this:
This Can’t Be Right
The Obama Administration asked for funds to buy a prison in Illinois to transfer Gitmo prisoners to: Rebuffed this month by skeptical lawmakers when it sought finances to buy a prison in rural Illinois, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with the money to replace the Guantánamo Bay prison. As a result, officials […]
Inconvenient GITMO Truths
Yes, ‘bulo knows, everybody is bored with Iraq/Afghanistan/GITMO. Just like everybody is bored with the criminal behavior of the Bush Administration (Although said boredom doesn’t extend to the slugs in the press who are outraged that Robert Gibbs didn’t treat Dick Cheney with respect. Perhaps, if their outrage had included revealing the multitude of criminal […]
A Deliberate Mess or More Incompetence?
How is this possible? President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered […]
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