From the GENERAL PROVISIONS of the Convention
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/History/Human_Rights/geneva1.html
Regardless if murder* and torture are being done by Bush. The legal possibility of it is wrong. If Bush could legaly murder and torture you, your family, maybe your kids, regardless if I did it or not, would’nt it be wrong?
Oh wait he can. All he has to do is declare you or anyone in your family an “unlawfull combatent”. See the problem now?
*yes murder, without a proper trial as defined in the Constitution I don’t see how it would be anythingless
I’m not rjung, but I sorely hope that Gitmo will go down in history as one of the biggest US gaffes since the Japanese internment camps.
My solution: Let them all go to whatever country they choose that will take them. Another couple hundred pissed off Islamic radicals free in the world is gonna be a small drop in a big bucket. Raze Gitmo.
Somewhere on US soil, build a holding facility worthy of people who may be innocent. I recognize that it’s not gonna be easy to sort through all the people we pick up, but we should keep that in mind when we detain them. Tieing them up with hoods and gags like mad animals and locking them in tiny chain-link cages with nothing but a Koran is NOT acceptable. The facility should have climate control, walls, private cells with reasonable appointments, and entertainment (libraries, televisions, common areas for supervised socialization, etc.). All future war on terror detainees go there.
Set up a tribunal with both civilian and military members to determine if they are or were terrorists (all proceedings should be published, unless something is a clear threat to security, as judged by the tribunal). If the tribunal suspects the detainee commited a crime, and there’s enough evidence, try the person in a civilian court. If the tribunal has compelling evidence the person has participated in terrorism, detain them indefinately, but allow periodic reviews and an appelate process–if a low risk, consider letting them live semi-free in the US under extremely close supervision. If neither of the above is true, repatriate them.
Oops! Now you all know I’m bush, secrect identity blown. Darn it all.
Okay that was typo caused by my changing my post after I first typed it to give it more impact.
I just wanted to say that Apos summed up what I was thinking perfectly. It may be that every single one of these detainees is evil incarnate, but once you give the green light to the torture or killing of any class of people, it can only get out of control. Especially when the ‘class’ is so poorly defined, and once someone is accused of belonging to that class, they lose any means of proving their innocence.
This is really shocking to me…and I can’t understand the support for it. Of course, given the demonstrated failure of the capital punishment system, I also have trouble understanding people in favor of the death penalty. For the record, I believe that there are people that deserve death, but think that the state is really bad at determining who these people are.
For me, the basic moral question is: ‘What if it were me?’ If you can ask yourself that, and then sanction what is being done, then more power to you, I guess.
Who is “they?” When did they “declare war” on us? Cite that anyone in Gitmo is affiliated with al Qaeda or guilty of any crimes against the US?
We are not at war with “terror.” That is a completely meaningless phrase. War has a specific legal definition. It also has no defined enemy. It’s a tautology to declare that the detainees in Cuba are our “enemies” because we arrested them. I want to know exactly what they did, I want any trials to be made public and I want any innocent detainees to be released and paid reparations. The Bushies have no right to suspend due process while also denying these people POW status. Gitmo is nothing but a stalag at this point.
[quote]
**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.
Any executions carried out on the basis of secret tribunals are illegal, anti-American and ethically corrupt.
I am cynical enough to believe that this administration would kill innocent people to further a political agenda. They’ve already done it.
Not unless they are fools. Assuming their goal is to win – i.e. either destroy America or at least massively change America’s foreign policy – and not simply to achieve martyrdom, openly declaring war, on nation-state terms, would be idiotic.
**
And which also includes things like presumtion of innocence, rules of evidence and extradition treaties which would essentially make it impossible to mount large-scale campaigns. So the US goes to a judge and they jump through hoops and make a case against ObL. And he is acquited based on lack of evidence, or found not guilty because of mental defect, or because the Navy SEALS didn’t read him his Miranda rights. Now what? We throw up our hands and say “oh well, we tried?” Even if he is convicted, the Taliban refuses to extradite, or more likely, in the YEARS it takes to build the case, and try him in abstentia, he simply goes underground, moving around among various nations that will host him; which do so because they can maintain plausible deniability about not knowing where he is …
Multiply that by a thousand “criminals” all of whom operate in countries that will impede investigation every step of the way, that have different justice systems, etc. For each and every one, you’re going to send in Marines with subpoenas? Are we supposed to make a separate case for the people who call the shots and disburse the money and work behind the scenes? Who operate in multiple nations through multiple intermediaries? Consider the difficulties cops have in convicting Mafioso, how often they beat the rap, and increase that by orders of magnitude.
More to the point, it’s not like we have the membership rolls, or even like membership rolls exist. So if the Marines do kick down the doors to catch terrorist Joe Smith, and they find him making bombs with his buddies Fred, Bob and Louie, whom we’ve never heard of, we’re supposed to take seriously their claims that they had no idea Joe was a terrorist, they just like making bombs for a hobby and let them stroll? Certainly making bombs in a Kabul basement is no violation of U.S. laws.
It’s not that they don’t deserve to be called “criminal” or treated as such; it’s that doing so would put them beyond any possibility of legal enforcement.
The fact that they don’t fit into our categories is exactly what they are counting on. They reject the whole nation-state paradigm – which is largely a European construct anyway – which all our defintions of “war” depend on. They can’t hope to defeat us militarily, economically or politically if they play by our rules, so either they quit or they “cheat.”
Since they’re not quitters, we’d better start figuring out how to deal with them as they are. When you’re bleeding to death on the sidewalk, it’s no consolation that the other guy shouldn’t have pulled a knife.
My point was just to show another instance in which saying that something is legally allowable in theory is massively different from saying that it is “ok” or “acceptable” if it were actually done, as has been repeatedly alleged here.
Torturing prisoners is, at this point, a hypothetical exercise, much like a mass-murdering diplomat (though I’ll grant that the former has a greater chance of becoming reality at some future date).
Yojimbo, IANAL and I am willing to be corrected, but the way I read that is that if A and B are aligned and at war with the alliance of X and Z, and X is not a signatory, A and B are still bound by Geneva in regards to Z.
The implication of the second sentence, to me, is that unless and until said power accepts and applies the provisions, than the powers who are parties are not bound.
You still haven’t proven that anyone in Gitmo is a terrorist. You’re just spouting a lot of ill-defined “us and them” rhetoric.
What US law have they broken? Assuming we are talking about people caught fighting against US troops in Afghanistan, it makes much more sense to call them POWs than criminals.
IANAL, but can this charged be leveled against someone for being a member of al Qaeda in Afghanistan?
I agree to an extent. Much of our anti-terror activity is and needs to be non-military in nature. The action in Afghanistan, though, was necessarily a military one.
Like others posting here, you are using a hypothetical (torture) used by the lawyers in the OP to assume that that is what the US is doing, or petitioning to do. That is incorrect.
“They” are al Qaeda. “They” have committed acts of war against the US, which is the equivalent of declaring war. I’m uninteresting in having a semantic debate with ObL over the nuances of the meaning of “war”. I’ll leave that to you. My cite is the attack on the WTC.
For that, you’ll need to give us a cite-- one which includes proof that the motive for killing someone is wholly political.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/3280439.stm
The fact is that several people have been released after a year or so of their lives have been taken away from them.
They were 100% innocent we have to assume since the US let them go. I’ve seen nothing to believe that all people at GITMO aren’t innocent. The may all be guilty as well but who the fuck knows anything as that’s the way the US wants it.
My country interned possible terrorists. They were wrong and I 100% disagreed with the process. The UK also did it. They were wrong also. The US is wrong to do it also.
Removal of legal support etc. and internment is a disgrace. You can debate the “legalities” all you fucking want.
These people have done nothing AFAIC other than be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If there is any proof that they were active terrorists and thus a risk to the US I’d have no problem with putting the fuckers in the deepest darkest hole you can think up after a guilty verdict but nothing has been forthcoming.
No charges, no legal support, no contact, under age kids.
A disgrace IMO. The US should do a lot better IMO.
The problem is that the situation in Gitmo does not fall into any legal category that exists at present. They are not prisoners of war (as Diogenes correctly points out, for all the rhetoric, we are not at war. There is no government to be at war with.), they are not criminals with respect to any given government (this is too international to be treated as such), and they have been convicted in no court of law, despite having been captured actively pointing guns at our soldiers (in most cases — the situations are more diverse than that). The term “terrorist” is accurate, but question begging, because it has to be established, and the means for establishing it are not themselves establishted. There is no court for trying them. There are no procedures, no standards of evidence for going about it.
This is what the statement before the Ninth Circuit means. And if the judges of the Ninth are uncomfortable with it, I don’t blame them. It puts human beings in legal limbo, and as judges do, they went for the extreme case. The government is not saying they have a right to torture these folks, but that there is at present no legal recourse for these people against anything. And so we are picking our way through a human rights minefield, trying to protect the victims of their acts, gather intelligence, and provide some sort of just procedures.
Saying to ship them back to their native countries is no answer. Their native countries don’t want them, and in most cases will treat them far more cruelly then they we will. The majority citizenship is Saudi, and they have more on their hands than they can handle right now; ship terrorists back to them now and they will simply disappear. Maybe they will survive in a cell someplace. Maybe not.
I keep watching for signs that ordinary criminals have been shipped to Gitmo under the rubric of “enemy combatents” and stripped of their rights. So far, I haven’t seen any. This is scaring me down to my socks, but at least so far I haven’t seen it applied wholesale.
We’ll see how it plays out, and what the tribunals come up with in the way of verdicts. I don’t see a lot of “not guilties” on the horizon. And I am still very afraid of the long term consequences of all this.
Could you clarify what you think the governments language was ment to establish?
Do you think they were just tossing out “innocent” pure hypotheticals? I doubt they were: unless they were seriously considering either, why would the mention such incredibly inflamatory things in their arguments?
The possibility of torture and legal murder is bad enough. Do you support the goverment having that ability?
Do you support the ability of foreign diplomats to murder with impunity?
Not at all. We need only assume that they were deemed to no longer be a threat.
(My bolding)
Yes. Lawyers do this all the time. If you can point out language that indicates the lawyers were seeking permission to torture, let’s have it.
No. But you need to be very careful here. There is a continuum of activity between “torture” and " friendly persuasion". I’ll leave it up to the lawyers to determine where to draw the line.
1.) If al Qaeda has been defined as the “enemy” (a definition which I have not seen officially spelled out by the administration) then members of al Qaeda must be accorded all the rights accorded to POWs as spelled out in the Geneva Convention.
2.) I have seen no evidence that anyone at Gitmo is in al Qaeda.
3.) If the detainees are “unlawful combatants” then who would be a legal combatant in this war. It seems ridiculous in the extreme for the US to wage war on an ill-defined enemy while also making an a priori declaration that anyone it attacks is an “unlawful combatant.” It reeks of an attempt for the US to disassociate itself from any of the ethical obligations to POWs while still trying to exploit the rhetorical value of the word “war.”
I would cite the fact that the stated justifications for the invasion of Iraq have been proven unequivocally false while it’s political value to the administration has been milked for it’s worth. Since no other reason than political has been shown to be valid I will draw my own conclusions.
As stated many times above the OP description is a straw man to say the least! I have yet to see anything from the “bushies” that shows there support for muder and torture on Gitmo. I see a ruling from the 9th circuit court saying that since no “civil” law can be found to define the prisoners, the military has total jurisdiction.
How that means that GW supports killing and torture, I have no idea. But lets try some reason here. Why would GW support such a stance on such highly visible prisoners? If the US wanted them dead they would have killed them in Afghanistan. Why bring them all the way to Gitmo just to kill/torture them? Doing it in the field would have assured no one found out. Makes no sense.
Is the holding of these prisoners legal? Dont know, hell, most legal experts dont know! While I dont support GW, I do subscribe to the fact that GW while ignorant on some things is not evil. And while im sure alot of shady things happen, worrying about this happening to the Gitmo prisoners isnt something
I don’t necessarily disagree with this. But I believe a case can be made that we need a new term for terrorists (other than crimianal or POW). The administration is using “enemy combatant”, but I’m also unsatisfied that this has been fully fleshed out, legally.
I haven’t either, which is why I’d like to see the whole process openned up. I do not believe, however, that the administration just grabbed a bunch of random folks and threw them in jail. I know you do, but I guess that’s just something we’ll have to agree to disagree about.
Well, a POW would be anyone in the Afghan (Taliban) army, fighting in uniform. I do agree that the US should have declared war on Afghanistan. That would have made certain legal aspects a lot clearer.