Bush Administration Supports Torture; Summarily Executing Gitmo Prisoners!

Great Debates
1

The complete article (published yesterday) may be found at Findlaw under Interrogation, Torture, the Constitution, and the Courts

The Nineth Circuit’s opinion may be found here. Adobe PDF file.

(Emphasis mine.)
Is there ever a time in our history where the government seeks to torture and execute people akin to the very enemies this country fought against in other wars? Is our freedom, our way of life so threatened by terrorism and extraordinary circumstances warrant throwing out what this country has stood for, for more than 200 years?

2

I see nothing in your quotes that suggests the federal government seek to torture anyone or asserts that it might be carried out. What the government counsel said was

“Federal court jurisdiction should be foreclosed… even if the plaintiffs were to claim that their captors were committing “acts of torture” on Guantanamo…”

In other words they are saying a specific legal status should exist even if the ACCUSATION is made. They didn’t say the accusation might become true. C’mon, you can see that difference.

3

That quotes seems to say to me that they “reserve the right” to torture and execute. Which isn’t the same as the OP suggests, but it’s still shocking they would be explicit about that, and that they indeed might have that power in the eyes of US law.

4

If they are military prisoners, then aren’t they to be subjected to a military tribunal? What does the ninth circuit have to do with anything in the military?

5

So you agree that the government should have the right to torture and summarily execute Gitmo prisoners? At the very least, due process should not exist? So the end justifies the means?

Taking this further, assume the government is actually saying what the Court stated. Do you have a problem with this Pandora’s Box? Wouldn’t this provide “justification” to enemies of the US to capture and kill Americans, if only because the US started this gruesome game of tit-for-tat?

I see you missed this part in the Court’s statement:

"{U}nder the government’s theory, it is free to imprison Gherebi indefinitely along with hundreds of other citizens of foreign countries, friendly nations among them, and to do with Gherebi and these detainees as it will, when it pleases, without any compliance with any rule of law of any kind, without permitting him to consult counsel, and without acknowledging any judicial forum in which its actions may be challenged.

You don’t have a problem with this?

Is the Bush Administration pushing for the ultimate game, even though it would occur on a US military base and subject to the UCMJ and the US Constitution? How will this play with the military personnel who have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution, yet be given an order that violates the very heart of the Constitution? Are you willing to execute a Gitmo prisoner, as ordered, knowing there has been no trial, no due process, and your oath requires you to uphold both of these?

6

Duckster, the title of the thread is disingenous to the point of falsehood.

If nation X is at war with nation Y, who has not signed the Geneva Convention, it is a simple statement of fact that X is under no obligation to treat enemy POWs in accordance with Geneva. That’s the way the treaty works: if one side refuses to commit itself to the rules, the rules are off for everyone.

If X points this out, does it then follow that they therefore plan on torturing and executing all prisoners? After all, “under their theory” they are allowed to.

7

What’s troublesome is not that the U.S. government might torture or summarily execute those prisoner–there already exist quasi-legal avenues to do so, such as handing the prisoners over to allied countries without the same superficial scruples–it’s that the U.S. government is arguing that there is no rule of law at all governing their actions on Guantanamo, that by virtue of their location they are absolutely free to do anything they want without review or censure.

If a law abiding government maintains a special place where it can break its own rules with impunity, that’s cause for concern that its law-abiding-ness is simply a matter of convenience.

8

So you agree that it is ok for the US government to torture and execute prisoners, in violation of its own Constitution with regard to due process, etc.?

9

Good Lord, of course not. What words do you see in my post that you could possibly take to mean THAT? Are you speaking the same language I am?

Duckster, you just completely fabricated something and then falsely attributed it to me. Are you going to be in the habit of doing this? Please clarify your position here.

But the government DIDN’T say that. That was my point.

Yes, I do have a problem with that. I started a thread complaining about the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners MONTHS ago. I guess you missed that.

However, the claim in your OP is very different; you claim that the government seeks to justify the possible use of torture. Yet nothing the government claimed can be construed to mean that. If the Ninth Circuit Court is claiming they did, I believe they erred, at least based on the facts you have provided. The quote from the government does NOT offer a justification for torture, or a claim that torture is being considered.

Are you asking ME this? No, I would not kill someone in such a circumstance.

10

The problem with any removal of our own due process system is that it cannot be limited to people with a certain status. That’s because once in prison, these people have no way to contest their status. The U.S. could arrest litterally anyone for no reason at all, make any kind of ridiculous charge, and the person would have no way to contest what was being done.

It already seems, for instance, that some of the people at Gitmo for more than a year turned out to be random people who were turned in as enemy combatants by local warlords merely to settle petty private scores. These people had no way to pursue or prove their claims that they were innocent, because if they are not given some semblance of due process, the government litterally has no reason to care or put any sort of spring in their step about verifying the truth of the matter.

The same thing happened in Vietnam: corrupt officials used our desire to use the harshest measures possible against anyone they pointed out as being a VC supporters to settle private scores that had nothing to do with the war: and we duitifully became their willing executioners on their sayso.

11

There is no war. The “War on Terror” is purely a rhetorical phrase like “War on Drugs” or “War on Crime.” We have not actually formally declared war on “terror,” nor have we defined what would constitute an enemy under those circumstances.

The Bushies have refused to call the detainees POWs and they have also refused to call them crimininal suspects. For now they have invented an ad hoc, meaningless designation of “unlawful combatants” which simply means that they happened to be civilians who were unlucky enough to be attacked by the US.

As yet, Bush has produced no evidence that these detainees are terrorists or that they are in any way enemies of the US. he needed to fill up cages in the wake of 9/11 and that’s what he did.

Now he’s stuck because he knows he can’t prove jack shit against most of them but he doesn’t have the political courage or the moral conscience to let them go before the election. He also knows that any public trials would show how thin his justifications were for herding these guys into Gitmo.

The best option from his point of view was to commence an assembly line of secret tribunals and fololowed by mass executions. that way he could get rid of these guys without any political damage.

He doesn’t want these guys to have any sort of recourse or access to the judicial system because the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. So the Bushies are trying to eliminate any kind of legitimate appeals to legitimate justice. They don’t want the courts even to consider allegations of torture or murder because they simply don’t want the justice system interfering with their death camp. It’s really that simple and that evil.

12

Diogenes the Cynic --"There is no war. The “War on Terror” is purely a rhetorical phrase . . . "

Um. I’m no expert, you understand, but it looks pretty much like a war from the standpoint of all conventional measures of warfare. Are you saying that they made the whole thing up? Nobody has actually been killed, except rhetorically? What sort of ‘formal declaration’ would be sufficient to convince a person that an actual war is being fought by actual men and women with actual weapons? Or are you saying that the war is not formally recognized by you, personally, and thus isn’t real?

Diogenes the Cynic – “As yet, Bush has produced no evidence that these detainees are terrorists or that they are in any way enemies of the US. he needed to fill up cages in the wake of 9/11 and that’s what he did. Now he’s stuck because he knows he can’t prove jack shit against most of them but he doesn’t have the political courage or the moral conscience to let them go before the election.”

I suspect you place quite a bit of personal power on the shoulders of one man, which would be a difficult accusation to demonstrate. Having made the accusation, you then use it to make conclusions. Wow. Must have been an interesting school, but let’s deal in reality instead of partisan politics for a moment – in this fine land of the brave and the free we hector our law enforcement employees into publishing and registering the names and addresses of certain offenders who have already been tried, convicted, and punished. Not all of them, mind you, but only the ones we have already decided haven’t been punished quite enough by the system. This way, we can punish them again by preventing them from having homes in our neighborhood, or having jobs at our companies. We don’t need to produce evidence that they will commit another crime. We’ve already, as a society, assumed that past behavior precludes reform.

So. This same group of brave, free, forgiving, liberal champions of the rights of the individual, who would see to it that a sex offender remains homeless and jobless for life due to the potential risk of a repeat offense, wish to stand and defend suicide bombers? Perhaps you are right. The fact that a man spent six months attending a terrorist training camp isn’t evidence of a crime. After all, he might have just been trying to lose weight. I say that we should have the political courage to let them all free, provided that they all move into Roseville, MN. After all, there is no credible evidence proving that these are not just ordinary folks being persecuted by an oppressive regime . . .

Diogenes the Cynic – “So the Bushies are trying to eliminate any kind of legitimate appeals to legitimate justice. They don’t want the courts even to consider allegations of torture or murder because they simply don’t want the justice system interfering with their death camp. It’s really that simple and that evil.”

Damn. Sounds like a pretty firmly considered conclusion. But, considering the accusation that “Bush has produced no evidence,” you might consider that tossing around terms like ‘death camp’ off the cuff creates a little bit of responsibility to demonstrate that your own accusations are in some way true. A perception of a lack on someone else’s part does not excuse a repeat of that lack, does it? I have problems with terms like ‘legitimate justice,’ and ‘meaningless designation,’ and ‘assembly line of secret tribunals,’ and such, if only because they are in and of themselves undefined, and designed solely to inflame rather than to illuminate. You won’t convince me with baseless, inflammatory accusations, so how about doing what you accuse the victims of your rhetorical attack of failing to do – prove it.

Gairloch
Some arses just ain’t worth saving.

13

Do I need to answer this? RickJay has already asked you to provide any evidence that torture is being practiced, alleged or even contemplated. Can you do so? If not, you’re pulling this out of your ass.

The adminstration is making the case that the people in Gitmo are not under the jurisdiction of the US legal system. You can disagree with this position, and many people do. You can point out, as the court did, that if that is the case torture would be possible, and it is indeed a troubling thought that certainly makes me, for one, uncomfortable with the situation. But it does NOT therefore follow, unless you are possessed of a religious belief in the utter evil of America, that torture is in actual fact being practiced or planned.

Foreign diplomats have immunuity from US law, and cannot be prosecuted, even for murder. They are outside the jurisdiction of American courts. Some people see this as a bad thing, and perhaps they’re right. But it does NOT therefore follow that diplomats commit murder, or that the purpose of diplomatic immunity is to make it easy for them.

14

There’s a big difference, though. You see, they declared war on us. As far as I can tell, “drugs” have yet to declare war on us in the manner that al Qaeda, et al, have.

Are you that cynical (no pun intended) that you think the administration would kill all the detainees to cover up a mistake? That’s a pretty wild accusation. In fact it’s an accusation without substance. A more likely scenario would be secret tribunals, perhaps a few executions, and a (possibly slow) release of the rest. As I’m sure you know, quite a few have been released already, as per this CBS article on Dec 1.

Having said that, I disagree with the administration that we need to do all this in secret. I see no reason not to open this procedure up to public scrutiny. IANAL, and don’t understand the legal technicalities of what the appropriate legal venue is for the tirials, but something much closer (at the very least) to a trial within our standard legal system seems to be in order.

15

So, because the President has called the current military activity a “war” – even though there is no foreign power whom we are specifically at war with, and no well-defined objectives for when this war would be considered over – it’s automatically acceptable for the US military to torture and execute prisoners, regardless of whatever due process, human rights, and/or merely moral principles may be involved?

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor.
(Somewhere out there, the Ghost of St. Reagan is saying, “You mean that’s all I needed? I just had to declare a ‘war’ on something, and then I could do whatever the hell I wanted? Shoot, wish I had thought of that twenty years ago…”)

16

You are setting up a false dilemma that they must be one or the other. They are not POWs, because they are not part of an army that is signatory to Geneva, nor are they criminals, as they were not arrested on US soil but captured in military action. “Unlawful combatatants,” IIRC is actually a term that has been used previously in laws of war.

Whether or not it actually fits here is another issue entirely, and IANAL. But there is a very clear reason why the US is pursuing the course they are. What is at stake here is is the future of armed conflict; as it stands now, nations are essentially able to engage in proxy warfare with the United States insofar as they harbor, fund and train terrorists. This is bad for the US; our military – all nations’-- is designed to fight the standing armies of other soverign nations in a “fair fight” that follows the “rules of war.” The fantasy is that we can elininate the proxy wars, and nations like Syria and Iran will either knuckle under or else “fight fair” in a declared war. They aren’t that stupid, of course.

But in the meantime, there are no clear rules of engagement for dealing with groups like Al-Quaeda and the Taliban; calling them “criminals” is meaningless and suggests that the 101st Airborne should have brought warrants to Kabul. But neither are they POWs – the Taliban were never recognized as the government of Afghanistan, and many weren’t even Afghani; so whom do we repatriate them to?

It’s a thorny legal issue and people of good will can disagree, and it needs to be dealt with. But the sort of groundless accusations in the OP are simply absurd.

17

Sale on straw men at the SDMB! All wild accusations entertained!

18

I don’t see that anyone is advocating that.

You might want to pick your common sense up as well.:slight_smile:

Reagan ain’t dead yet…

Why not take some time out from Bush-bashing and give this issue some serious thought. Furt has made some very good points. It certainly doesn’t make sense to call these guys “criminals”. I don’t see the need to read ObL his miranda rights. Are they POWs? Maybe. But release of POWs hinges on the end of hostilities. How do we determine when the end of hositilities is? We’re in new territory, and it’s not unreasonable that new categories for detainees should be considered.

What’s your proposed alternative, rjung? Or do you just prefer being the sideline critic?

19

JM: *It certainly doesn’t make sense to call these guys “criminals”. *

Sorry, I think it makes perfect sense to call terrorists “criminals”, because that’s exactly what they are. If they wished to attack the US by force of arms, they should have joined the military of a state that was prepared to declare war on us openly; then they’d be “enemy combatants”. If they wished to draw public attention to what they consider their grievances against the US, they should have organized nonviolent protests, strikes, etc.; then they’d be “agitators” or “demonstrators”.

What they did, though (what terrorists have generally done and continue do), was to conspire to murder large numbers of civilians, breaking any number of laws in the process. In my book, what that makes 'em is “criminals”, and pretty heinous criminals at that.

I have always objected to militarizing the struggle against terrorism, including the use of phrases like “War on Terror”. IMO, besides the dangerous vagueness of not knowing who or where your opponents are or whether or when you’ve won or lost, it’s very counterproductive in that it gives the terrorist a comparatively honorable rhetorical status as “adversary” or “enemy”. Terrorists do not deserve to be considered “the opposing team” in a war context. They are criminals—mass murderers—and should be dealt with as criminals.

And that includes extending to alleged terrorists the protections of the criminal justice system, e.g., no torture, no summary execution.

20

Your example is valid… except that the host nation has the option of expeling the murdering diplomat as a persona non grata whilst Gitmo prisoners have no recourse at all… plus diplomats gain nothing by commiting murder, while US soldiers might think torturing gitmo prisoners might result in information.

Quite different no ? A sad development for sure… when its inconvenient just let the law aside…