Bush replaces/reshuffles top generals

[elucidator]

Just so! Even though they share in the universality of human rights, they lack the legal mechanisms to protect those rights from those who would encroach. In this instance, us.

[Sevastopol]

@Bricker

The Sixth Amendment doesn’t apply to the people held in Guantanamo Bay. It’s outside the borders of the US, and the people held there are not charged with crimes. They are battlefield captures that would normally be Prisoners of War, but for the fact that they do not meet the criteria for POWs.

The only slight problem with this is that every time the administration’s lawyers try something like it before a court they inevitably end up getting tossed out. Like former solicitor-general Ted Olson. Wasn’t it good that his wife was killed too?

[BrainGlutton]

@Martin Hyde

Wars are fought to achieve specific goals, you measure the relative success of a military venture primarily based on whether or not those goals have been achieved.

But in this particular war, the stated goals were meaningless and the actual goals unmentionable – so how do we measure success?

[BrainGlutton]

@John Mace

Why would they be? The BoR is intended as examples of rights secured by US citizens against the US government. Were any of those “grabbed” US citizens?

You won’t find the word “citizen” in the BoR, and foreigners have always been afforded the same freedoms protections under it as citizens – so long as they are on American soil.

[BrainGlutton]

@RickJay

I didn’t claim to you were accusing BrainGlutton of saying that. What I am saying is that you claimed BrainGlutton was referring to body counts in terms of measuring military success, which he was not.

No, I wasn’t. I was just assuming that if we’re there to help the Iraqis, keeping them from getting killed is automatically a core policy goal. That seems like an obvious no-brainer to me. But Martin seems comfortable with the idea that we may have to destroy the village in order to save it.

[John_Mace]

[QUOTE=Sevastopol]
The only slight problem with this is that every time the administration’s lawyers try something like it before a court they inevitably end up getting tossed out. /QUOTE]
Can you point us to the SCOTUS decision that acknowledged 6th amendment rights for the detainees in Guantanamo?

[BrainGlutton]

@Martin Hyde

The issue is the stability of Iraq, not the body count of Iraqis or Americans or et cetera, I have no idea in what manner we can influence the body count, but I certainly do believe we can indeed create a stable Iraqi state that will last in perpetuity after we’ve mostly withdrawn our soldiers.

It’s too late for that, Martin. It has been too late at least since the day General Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer. At this point, no Iraqi government, however democratically organized, will have any perceived legitimacy so long as it is the creation of Americans. The only kind of stability Iraq is going to know in the near future is the kind of stability that comes after a bloody civil war, when everybody is sick of fighting and too exhausted to continue; see Yugoslavia. And that’s going to happen whether our troops are there or not.

[BrainGlutton]

In other news, the war’s death toll on Iraqis tripled in the last half of 2006.

But that’s just more “body count” irrelevance, eh, Martin?

[elucidator]

You know, there was a time in my life when I actually had some hope never to hear the words “body count” again.

[BrainGlutton]

@elucidator

You know, there was a time in my life when I actually had some hope never to hear the words “body count” again.

Really? It’s hard to discuss an action movie or slasher pic without that phrase coming up.

[BrainGlutton]

Admiral Fallon’s appointment to command CENTCOM might be a very ominous development, according to this article:

If engagement with Iran and Syria was even remotely on the agenda, Abizaid is exactly the man you’d want on the job at Centcom overseeing US forces and strategy in the region. But if that’s not on the agenda, if you’re thinking instead of using force against Iran and/or Syria, then Admiral Fallon is exactly the man you’d want at Centcom.

Why? Because combined air and naval operations are his forté. Fallon began his combat career as a Navy combat flyer in Vietnam, and he served with carrier-based forces for twenty-four years after that. He commanded a carrier battle wing during the first Gulf War in 1991 and led the naval group supporting NATO operations during the Bosnia conflict four years later. More recently, Fallon served as vice chief of naval operations before becoming the head of Pacom in 2005. All this means that he is primed to oversee an air, missile and naval attack on Iran, should the President give the green light for such an assault–and the fact that Fallon has been moved from Pacom to Centcom means that such a move is very much on Bush’s mind.

:eek: