But you were the one who asserted the detainees are there “legally,” even though we don’t really know on what grounds they were arrested, or whether any of them ever have borne arms against the United States, under any circumstances, lawful or otherwise.
Investigation and formal report. Any action taken now would be ridiculously premature. If you didn’t like Gitmo before, you’re not going to like it now. If you liked it before, a few “terrorists” committing suicide just means the world has a few less “terrorists”. I don’t see this changing anyone’s mind until and unless we know more details. I’m in the former category. I didn’t like it before, and I don’t like it now.
I seriously doubt that this will have any effect on Bush in terms of his handling of Gitmo. Just like keeping our troops in Iraq, he thinks he’s doing the right thing, and isn’t going to let anyone tell him otherwise.
No Guantanamo prisoner can be declared innocent, since they are not given a trial.
No prisoner is awaiting a trial.
If the US is prepared to put people in life imprisonment without access to lawyers or family, why would they balk at killing them?
Perhaps that’s why lawyers and family are excluded.
What ‘organisation’? There’s no evidence against anyone in Guantanamo.
There have been UK citizens imprisoned there without trial. When released they were (of course) set free in the UK, since there was no evidence against them.
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No, it wasn’t legal. First, we dont know how and why there were captured. Maybe some were part of the Afghan army, for instance. In which case, they would be prisonners of war. And many others certainly weren’t part of any organization since they were freed. One of the first one was, IIRC, an elderly shepperd. That’s the annoying part with all these secrets. You can’t know anything about the prisonners, so you can’t state “they belong to such and such organization”, except if you take it on faith. And I think there has been a number of reports of people being send to Guantanamo for no reason at all (for instance abducted and sold to the US fores as “terrorists”). So, no knowing who they are, you can’t say what should be their status.
More importantly, them not being prisonner of war doesn’t make their detention legal. If they arent prisonner of war, they must be criminals, or suspected criminals, or something. In which case they have a right to a due process of law. Look simply at the UDHM. The fact that prisonners of war have particular rights doesn’t mean that other people can be arbitrarily arrested and detained in an occupied country (or anywhere else for that matter). There’s no “fair game for anything” category in a occupied country. There are civilians who have rights, prisonners of war who have rights, and criminals who have rights.
There’s actually a name for this category of people. But it’s not “ennemy combattant”. It’s "political prisonners " (and I mean “political prisonners” as used in your average dictatorship, not as used in some western countries who have such a category of detainees, but with the same rights as everybody else).
Maybe, and I don’t state that they were killed. What I state is that since the USA respect no rules re the detainees and provides no informations, the kind of things that normally allow us to be fairly certain that nothing ugly is happening, you can’t casually dismiss such a suspicion. You don’t know who they are, you don’t know why they are there, you don’t know what happens to them, so you can’t be sure of anything. There’s no obvious difference between these people and others political prisonners detained on the Cuban side of the same island. Nobody knows who is detained for nobody knows which reason for nobody knows how long in both cases. When the situation is such, you’re in no position to :rolleyes: when such an accusation is made, because you’ve no basis to do so. For all you know (which is : nothing) it could be true.
And these are not slogans. Since when is opposing secret arrests for secret causes considered an empty slogan in a western democracy? In other times, would you have expected such a thing to happen in the USA? Wouldn’t you have expected the perpetrators to be prosecuted and harshly punished? When did you lose perspective? When did you forget what were the fundamental values we’re supposed to defend in a democracy? When did “due process of law” became a “slogan” for you?
And once again, if they actually commited suicide while arbitrarily detained, how are their warden not responsible for their death?
From the Reuters story on Yahoo news, my empahsis added.
I surely hope, for his sake, there’s a “psychological” burried somehwere in the “…” of that quote. Otherwise, that was a really stooopid thing to say. We detain some guys indefinitely, they kill themselves, and it’s an act of war against us? Puh-leeze! Say that we suspect they tried to martyr themselves if you have to say something, but better to just not comment on the motivation at all until after the investigation.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!
No, you are putting words in my mouth here. What I have ‘faith’ in is that they THINK that torturing those prisoners will get them useful information…i.e. they don’t just torture them for kicks. Personally I don’t think that torture by and large is effective in gaining intelligence. There is a huge difference though between torturing a terrorist to obtain information and deliberately killing a person you know is innocent just to cover up the fact that they WERE innocent…which was the actual point I was trying to make.
:rolleyes: I’m militantly unsurprised.
Well, on this point we are in (rare) agreement. 
:rolleyes: Hows that working out of them so far Der? They managed to get much past us to this point? Especially something THIS big with this much attention?
I actually think you are just argueing for forms sake about this at this point.
-XT
Well, John, I’ve been watching the present Executive Department real close and in the words of James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff I haven’t seen them do anything real smart yet.
BTW, people have mentioned it above (at length, and more eloquently than I can), but can I just reiterate two points:
- Detention in Guantanamo Bay is illegal, even under US laws.
- Torture does not produce accurate information, and intelligence based on torture is not only immoral and illegal to use as evidence, but notoriously unreliable.
This guy is in the military, and I expect he’d be in the military regardless of who sits in the WH. I wouldn’t align him with Bush or his appointees. My experience is that most career military guys are pretty sharp, but what this guy said certainly can’t be characterized that way, unless the caveat I gave above turns out to be true.
Which specific law(s) are you refering to?
Would your constitution be a good start? I do believe one of those amendments in your quaint little bill of rights forbids holding a prisoner without charge.
I thought that when I heard the soundbite ("U.S. says prisoners committing suicide is “act of warfare” - not the best), but apparently what they were referring to is a an act of propaganda war; they killed themselves in order that the world would once more turn against the U.S… Much as I dislike the situation, I have to admit that is a possibility.
The military, like everyone else in the Executive Department take their cues from the top echelon. Do you really think that continued defense of torture as an acceptable interrogation method didn’t have some fallout in things like what happened at Abu Graihb?
They have been charged. Whether or not those charges are accurate is a matter for trial, which it seems they won’t be getting anytime soon, but they have been charged.
Are you positive that’s true of all of them?
Don’t the words “swift and speedy trial” appear in there somewhere too?
For one, it’s not against the law to violate the constitution. There has to be a statute derived from the constitution. Secondly, the guarantees in the Bill of Rights do not pertain to non-US citizens outside the borders of the US. Even if you consider Gitmo to be US territory, the enemy combatants there would not be accorded the same rights as someone who was, say, visiting the US and committed a crime during the visit.
Care to take another shot at it?
Yes, but the “escape clause” is that this only applies to “criminal prosecutions.” Action agains enemies of the US are not “criminal prosecutions” within the meaning of Amendment VI.
No, i’m not. Even if all the prisoners we know of have been charged (which i’m not certain of), it’s always possible there are some prisoners we don’t know about.
Actually, I’m not sure any of them have actually been charged with anything, but I’m certain that not all of them have. But it’s unclear to me that that is illegal, per US law. The SCOTUS has argued that it is in the case of US citizens, but that’s quite different.