Martin E. Dempsey Quotes
I've been in the group that believes it's in our national interest to close Guantanamo. It does create a psychological scar on our national values. Whether it should or not, it does.
Dempsey, Martin E. Interview by Chris Wallace. Fox News Sunday, Fox News, 11 Jan. 2015.
The George W. Bush Administration attempted to avoid compliance with American Law and the Constitution by keeping captured terrorists in a Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and claiming that the American law did not there prevail. The Supreme Court twice ruled that the practices of the Administration in dealing with Terrorist prisoners violated the law and the Constitution. Meanwhile world public opinion was very opposed to the Bush Administration practices with captured war combatants which had never been attempted by any other administration. Finally President Bush in June of 2007 announced that Guantanamo would be closed.
There were however several instances of torture being used. The administration used the term “enhanced interrogation” for waterboarding and other acts that the US has previously punished Americans for using. The George W. Bush administration actually had a team of their lawyers in the Justice Department write a memo to uniquely define torture so as not to include the torture techniques that were used as “enhanced interrogation”.
The American military and CIA officials made a number of errors in dealing with some of the prisoners. Once military desecrated a Muslim Holy Book with urine, many or the active and violent prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, but secrecy allowed Islamic propagandists to claim that this was done with almost all. Worst of all CIA interrogators were allowed to use ‘enhanced techniques’ (torture). Prisoners were not allowed to have reasonable contact to attorneys and where there were, these were monitored. Most of the prisoners were never charged with anything and yet they never received sentences and no one had any idea whether or not they would ever be charged, tried, sentenced or released. Even where there were some prisoners that the American authorities were willing to release, only a few were as their original counties would not accept them. Islamic extremist terrorist recruiters use Guantanamo to propagandize against America, and many new terrorist recruits were primarily motivated they claimed by the way that fellow Muslims had been treated in Guantanamo. Almost all agreed that Guantanamo was a negative, but it became very difficult to close it down and despite all the errors of operation, very few Americans were willing to return all these men to the battlefield to re-jojn the terrorists and other countries were unwilling to take the responsibility for their custody.
The President and Vice President wanted places to interrogate suspected terrorists where they did not have to obey American law, where the press could be kept away from the prisoners, and there would be no way that a prisoner could get the assistance of attorneys and American Judges could not have any jurisdiction. A number of the prisoners had been picked up by mistake, or were accused by people who had scores to settle, and if the CIA had made a mistake, the public could not find out. Further, they wanted to torture certain prisoners and wanted places where they could use their “enhanced interrogation”—see {637536}--without the public finding out.
Martin Edward Dempsey, sometimes known as Marty Dempsey, is a retired United States Army general who served as the 18th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1, 2011 until September 25, 2015. He previously served as the 37th Chief of Staff of the Army from April 11, 2011, to September 7, 2011. Before that, he served as Commanding General, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, from December 8, 2008, to April 11, 2011, as Acting Commander, U.S. Central Command, from March 24, 2008, to October 30, 2008, as Deputy Commander, U.S. Central Command, from August 2007 to March 23, 2008, and as Commanding General, Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq (MNSTC-I), from August 2005 to August 2007. Dempsey assumed his assignment as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on October 1, 2011 and stepped down from the Chairmanship on September 25, 2015. He now serves as a professor at Duke University and is the chairman of USA Basketball.
