Giving Up Gitmo, One Way, Or Another

YO, NORDE AMERICANO; the Big O wants to shut down Gitmo, just the terrorist detainee part of it, and one way or another, he intends to do just that, presumably by executive order. He has wanted to do this since before he was sworn in in 2009; he would have preferred to do it with congressional cooperation, but as we know, securing congressional cooperation for anything these days is rather like pulling teeth. What else is there, other than executive orders, tool wise, in the presidential too kit, in these polarized political times? Now our right wing extremist brethren and sistern will really blew their tops. Just for the record, no president has ever broken the law until a high court says that he has. If the U.S. supreme Court eventually says that Obama's spate of executive orders is illegal, by a four to four vote, or whatever, then so be it, illegal they are. Legality in America is whatever the high courts says it is. The right wingers, however, in their unquenchable zeal to implicate a presumably innocent until proven guilty chief executive, have repeatedly accused the president of acting "lawlessly", illegally, without regard to the constitution, blah blah blah. What they omit is that, according to that very constitution, one is indeed innocent until proven and verified guilty. But why should we expect our conservative judges, jury, and executioner right wing militia types to give a fig about all that inconvenient detail? We seem to be forgetting that executive orders really don't matter much; they only have the force of law until the president who issues them leaves office, which, in Obama's case, will be regrettably soon. Also lost in the shuffle is the inconvenient truth that America's very ownership and control of the Guantanamo military base is, by any reasonable standard of jurisprudence, strictly illegal, the land upon which it sits having been in effect stolen by the good ole U.S. of A., in the aftermath of the Spanish-american War of 1898, itself of dubious legality. (remember the Maine, and its boiler plate explosion mistaken by Yankee war mongers for a foreign attack). During consequent 1898 peace "negotiations", another of our imperialist presidents, William McKinley, extracted the land grant at gunpoint, for a paltry fifteen million dollars or so. Lest we forget, any contract entered into under coercion is inherently illegal, sort of like all those native American thingies we so love to overlook. But far be it for us to ever expect our war mongering conservative colleagues to comprehend this.