* Pretty much echoing what President Obama said yesterday about closing Gitmo, Colin Powell (George W. Bush’s Secretary of State), weighed in.
“As secretary of state, Guantanamo was a heavy load to carry as I went around the world talking about human rights, talking about how you treat prisoners, talking about how you can’t have indefinite detention or the use of torture to get things out of people. And I always had pushback at me, ‘But look at what you were doing at Guantanamo,’” Powell said. “And the fact of the matter is, it has always been slowly closing over the last 10 years. We started with almost 800 people in Guantanamo.”
“We’re down now to less than 100. Well, where’d the other 700 go? They’re gone, they’ve been sent back because we didn’t have charges on them, we didn’t know how they’d gotten there in the first place,” he said. “And so we’re down to under 100 and we’re going to cut that in half over the next several months. Do we really want to keep, do we really need to keep this place open for 50 remaining detainees who we could easily move to a secure facility in the United States?”
* Aaron Rupar caught Ben Carson acknowledging that his presidential campaign might be a big scam.
During an appearance on “CNN Newsroom” yesterday, Carson, referring to the propensity of his staffers to raise and spend huge sums of money, laughed and said, “We had people who didn’t really seem to understand finances… or maybe they did — maybe they were doing it on purpose.”
* Speaking of unprecedented:
Rep. Issa (R) is encouraging members of the US military to refuse to carry out President Obama’s orders to close the the Gitmo prison facility.
Josh Marshall asks, “Isn’t there a word for that?”
* Kevin Drum reminds us that Clinton derangement syndrome is alive and well.
Hillary didn’t order the assassination of Vince Foster, and she didn’t set up a personal email account in order to secretly halt the rescue effort in Benghazi. But thanks to the obsessive Clinton hatred of Judicial Watch and the assistance of credulous judges like Emmet Sullivan, the “drip drip drip” will keep on coming.
* If you’re not on Facebook or don’t follow Barack Obama, you might not know that the PR battle over a Supreme Court nominee is ON!!!
* Finally, a wonderful source of optimism is to practice the art of appreciating the talents of young people. So my gift to you today is this video of 13 year old yohan Kim playing his version of Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” Listen all the way through because it just keeps getting better.
