I was with you until the last sentence. The Bill or Rights does not apply to “those guys” (there can be no question about that), but we don’t need the BoR in order to treat them humanely.
Right, collectively, the entire American left are too wussy to make a fuss, even though it would give them a huge advantage to be able to say “Here’s the law they broke, here’s how they broke it, trial please”. That’s as wrong as saying all Republicans don’t care for international laws or treaties.
No argument from me on that score, but that doesn’t seem to be the opinion of many in the US including high ranking government officials who claim the authority to treat them inhumanely if it advances our interests. Those officials must think things like the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention(s) are the only things that protect people because they sure go to great lengths to try to prove that the “enemy combatants” aren’t covered by them.
Because anything that’s not illegal is moral, right John?
…of course its legal acrobatics: and you’ve participated in enough threads about Gunatanemo Bay to know precisely why. Even if we conceeded the United States had the legal right to hold Al Quaeda and Taliban prisoners “caught on the battlefields of Afghanistan” as “Enemy Combantants” at Guantanemo Bay, there is very little evidence that that has happened at all. Only 5% of detainees were captured on the battlefields by United States Forces. If somebody is handed over to US forces for a bounty payment, does Geneva apply? If not, what should?
Your lawyers may be correct that people captured in the circumstances as often portrayed by the US administration may well fit the definition of “legal”, but when you look at the actual evidence that some of these people are being held on, and if you read the transcripts of the Combantant Status Tribunals, it is clear as mud that the “tribunals” were not competent, the evidence against most of the detainees flimsy, and that Guantanemo Bay does not help the war on terror, but hurts it.
…my previous threads…
I would say that, over the last six years, our government, acting on our behalf has made this a true statement. We elected them to office once and let them steal it once. Of course, the bulk of the moral shame has to go to the people who voted for the people now in power.
That’s somewhat harsh. John’s already said he’s against it morally, and it was a legal discussion.
I don’t agree that it doesn’t violate international treaties.
As for the internal legality, the circus we have seen during the last years has been a big, unavoidable neon add stating : “The USA don’t support human rights, they support american citizens priviledges”. Something as basic as a right to a fair trial or a lawyer is just a fucking priviledge not open to everybody. This is…odious. Just odious. Vile. I’m sorry to say that, but this displaces the USA to the category of “Limited respect of human rights. Arbitrary arrests without recourse legal. Mostly free, but not always, and not for everybody.” countries. It’s an utter shame.
I’m not going to forget that given this wonderful conception of freedom the USA has, I could, if I visited this country, be arrested at any moment, for any reason and detained undefinitely without access to a lawyer, without any charges, etc… Worse than that, I could even be abducted by american operatives (as it happened to a German citizen because, mind you, he had the same name as someone else, as it hapened also in Italy), even in an european country, even possibly in my own country, and subsequently again be detained without charges, etc… and the american courts, the american authorities, the american public would be perfectly OK with that. The USA is a country I must be warry of, at the level of individual liberties (as opposed to, say, international issues or such things ), which is not exactly the concept most people used to have regarding it. The USA isn’t as safe as other western democracies.
I’m not sure whether this has always been the american conception of “rights” and “freedom” , or if it’s a recent “devolution” and runs contrary to accepted traditions and/or expectations and/or popular american conceptions, but in any case it’s shameful. It would be way better if I could think that actually it’s only Bush running amok. It also would be way better if the american public didn’t become accustomed to thinking this way.
Note that the post I wrote was originally way longer and way harsher. But since I had forgotten to sleep this night, I eventually thought it would be wiser to delete most of it lets I would wonder tomorrow why the hell I had posted that. Let’s just say I’m very upset against the USA at the moment.
I’ve never been convinced by this argument. “The People” is just a concept, or a collection of individuals. Morality and shame only apply individually to each of these persons, who, for the most part, have an extremely limited influence on the decision eventually made.
So we are agreed torture is taking place. Where does this notion that the victims are terrorists come from? It appears the logic is that: they must be terrorists, otherwise why are US forces torturing them? Let’s look at that. Is it any different to to ‘toturing them for kicks’? No, it isn’t really, is it?
The best way to think of Guantanamo Bay is as an Olympic event. It is a showcase for the USA to demonstrate to the folks at home and abroad that: “This is who we are.”
What I want to know is what kind of warped internal “logic” allows a person to believe that the treatment of the Guantanamo detainees is legal, moral, or a good idea on any level whatsoever. But as I have previously posted elsewhere, regardless of whether the detainees are required under the Geneva Conventions to be treated as POWs, no basis for that judgment has been made public. Why should we believe that the judgment has even been made at all, much less by anyone with the necessary information, authority, or fucking common sense to do so?
Even in the worst-case scenario that every single detainee is an Al-Qaeda operative (which I highly doubt, given the snippets of info we have seen so far), coming from an administration that has issued legal opinions that physical abuse of prisoners doesn’t constitute torture unless ït causes “Physical pain…equivalent to intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” I am more than a bit reluctant to believe the line they are spinning, to say the least.
What is the point of torturing someone, aside from the illegality and brutality and inhumanity of it? What is it going to gain? We don’t (and shouldn’t) treat convicted mass murderers that way, so why should we treat people that way who haven’t even been charged, much less convicted of anything whatsoever? What is the *point *of not informing people’s families of their fates?
The whole purpose of the Geneva Conventions was to codify the norms of civilized human behavior, and however much hair-splitting one tries to perform, what is going on at Guantanamo does not conform to the norms of civilized human behavior. Frankly the whole thing makes me want to throw up, and I would hope the vast majority of Americans would agree with me on that if they were paying attention to this issue at all, which - sadly - they probably aren’t.
And regardless of whether Guantanamo detainees are required to be treated as POWs, the U.S. has ratified the U.S. Convention Against Torture, which prohibits ratifying states from conducting or allowing torture on “any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State.” Thus all the legalistic hair-splitting over exactly what constitutes torture, and the obscenely repugnant and euphemistic practice of “extraordinary rendition.”
Eva Luna, see my previous post for the answer.
Cruelty; entertainment. The assertion of our own “moral superiority” and the subhuman nature of any non-American.
I really don’t see the value of arguing that it’s not moral but it’s legal. That seems to me to be the first cousin to a quibble, it not the brother or sister. I’m quite disappointed that the American people who, according to the self-serving 4th of July speeches by our political big-shots, are the fairest, most magnanimous people on the earth haven’t risen up and demanded that our government produce proof out in the open and sufficient for an indictment that the Guantanamo detainees are a hazard to the national security should they be released. In my opinion they holding them in the way we are is a greater threat to our security than they could possible be.
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Because it’s an important point. If it’s illegal and immoral, that’s fine, things can be set up to deal with that relatively easily, and a guilty party can be found. If it’s legal and immoral, then things become more difficult.
I agree with you that it shouldn’t matter, but *in practice * it does matter.
I see your point. However, I maintain that defending something as legal that you consider to be immoral allows unscrupulous leaders to act immoraly in the name of all of us based on a narrow, legal leg. Irrespective of how things are I really think that for a nation to walk such a fine line of legal but reprehensible actions is shameful.
It will be argued that “we are at war.” Well, we don’t act like it. Until the recent rise in fuel prices, few in the US are suffering the effects of that war. I have stated and still maintain that bad as the 9/11 attacks were, they didn’t directly threaten our existence as a nation. They were criminal acts and should have been handled as such through police work, diplomacy and drying up the financial support. Of course the latter would have put out of joint the noses of our good friends, the Saudi’s.
I agree with you, but there is a good reason for defending something that’s legal but immoral; it gets the law changed. If it is legal, but people ignore that because it’s immoral, there’s no need to get it changed, since it doesn’t have any practical effect - in that situation. Until a similar one comes along, and there’s more confusion over what’s legal and what isn’t, and so on down the line.
If the law is ignored now, we get a good result; the peopel in Guantanamo are sent to trial/released. But what happens the next time a case like this comes up? If it’s legal, there’s always a defense. Pointing out the law now is more likely to get it changed.
This is more of an indictment of the conditions of incarceration at GITMO than anything else. When someone commits suicide in a prison, there are many factors that may contribute to this.
I would assert that having an indefinite term of incarceration, complete isolation from family and friends, coupled with “interrogation techniques” that have been questioned by Human Rights groups across the world, has led to this.
Many people cannot take that type of condition and, as a result, there is substantial liability on the Bush administration for having this policy. You cannot fault, per se, the prison administration since they are exercising “apparently” legal authority. But, GITMO was designed to break the spirit of the prisoner, it did this.
While my husband worked at a SuperMax prison, he had 3 men commit suicide. He used to say that prison was deisgned to “break the spirit” of the individual. This was not out of his choice, rather it was the nature of this type of facility.
Out of the 3 men who killed themselves, only 1 was “mentally ill”, the other two simply made a very rational decision. He told me a story once of one inmate who killed himself and he was one of the first people who entered the crime scene.
He immediately saw a clear picture develop. Laid out, clockwise from the toilet next to the door, to the bed on the wall, was a series of letetrs and papers. It started with the inmate’s sentencing records, progressed through letters from family expressing care and hope, to poems and writings by the inmate expressing first fear, then anger, then sadness, then hopelessness. It culminated in the final piece documentation that was on the ground 1 foot from where he hung himself: His denial of appeal.
This particular man actually hung himself by sitting down, since the cells were deisgned to resist suicide by hanging, he used a small table and actually had to sit with mild pressure on his neck. He was only 1/2 inch off the floor. At anytime, if he got scared, or had second thoughts, he could easily have stood up. However, he had made the rational decision to end his life and he was devoted to this.
My husband carries this inmate’s death with him still to this day. There are many reasons for this, but most of them derive from the fact that this inmates was not housed in the proper environment and he could get no one to listen to him. He was a really bad dude, high-degree black belt, special forces trained, mercenary who was “on loan” from another state because he had been considered a high risk to stay in his home state. He was linked to over 50 murders, but none of them could be proven because he left no witnesses, even his partners. He was eventually caught for having 10 pounds of marijuana and was serving 15 years. The sentence was likely so severe because law enforcement in the State he originated from knew about his other dealings.
Therefore, avoiding the conspiracy notions that attempt to assert there is some nefarious “cover-up” is absolutely necessary for any one that opposes GITMO. These can be easily dismissed as fanatical rantings. Der Thris’s assertions only harm the case against this foreign policy and I would really appreciate it if he, and others like him, would stop this sort of over reaction. I mean no offense by that personally to the poster, rather I hope logic can make him see that we must oppose these practices with reason, logic and objective arguments.
Thus, informed dialog about the very nature of the conditions of this particular form of incarceration (GITMO) may lead to the abolishment of something that is grossly inhumane and against the belief system of any person that truly holds dear to their heart the values of liberty, freedom and justice.