“Usually”, but torture is an extreme measure, if it should ever be used it certainly wouldn’t be used in normal circumstances.
For example if you’ve captured a lot of enemy naval officers and you’re the Japanese, you might torture them for information about upcoming operations. Ship captains usually have somewhat detailed knowledge about impending operations their ship will be participating in. You torture them and demand them to explain upcoming operations. Meanwhile you do the same to other prisoners. Then you compare their stories. If their stories don’t match, you make the torture far worse and promise even worse to come if they don’t tell you something believable.
The Japanese killed a lot of POWs as a matter of course anyway, so not like it really costs them anything to torture some guys to death.
It was precisely fear of this sort of thing that lead Captain Cromwell, after his submarine Sculpin was mortally wounded, to go down with his ship. He had detailed knowledge about the upcoming Operation Galvanic and was also well informed on the ULTRA program and feared that torture/drugging could lead to him spilling information. He ended up choosing death to the possibility of succumbing to Japanese interrogation.
Plus, if you’re the Japanese, prisoners like that are never going to just give you information. You may never get accurate information from torture, but in a big war like that mountains of intelligence is collected. Even a very small chance of getting the inside scoop on an upcoming operation is worth all the negatives associated with torture if you’re the Japanese. Especially since they had no concern for things like the treatment of POWs and also didn’t care at all if retaliatory action was taken against their own POWs (as the Japanese detested any soldier who surrendered and would have seen it as a fitting fate if the Americans tortured them.) Maybe something the sub commander tells you actually matches with other intelligence you’ve gathered, if that happens it might serve as a piece of a large collection of uncertain intel and helps to give you more certainty about it.
No one was talking about Americans being offered Japanese citizenship. Whatever they feel about America I suspect most Iraqis would jump at the offer of permanent residency, when you live in a very unsafe country niceties like it being where you’ve lived your whole life and it being the culture in which you were raised take a backseat to the fact your children might get gunned down or blown up any day.
OR … you can walk in with bushel baskets of $100 bills … he has 30 seconds to delivery the gold, or you’re walking out with your $100 bills. Which is lawful?
The effectiveness of the torture we conducted is classified information … strange … if it was saving American lives, the military would be hawking it over the media.
No, I think nearly everyone at Git’mo now factually guilty even if it could not be proved in open court due to security concerns, time elapsed, etc. The fact that releasing them will likely mean roughly a dozen more terrorists out there to kill innocent people is enough for me to moderately support the stays quo until a better viable option presents itself.
So you think the views of a person who stayed commissioned to oversee a place that he felt was wrong in order to gain another star and receive more retirement and then, once retired and with nothing to lose, spoke out against said place, are more credible than someone who would give up a promotion in order to publicly decry a place that he felt was wrong?
They can’t be put in federal prisons, because they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
So, this:
…is off the table as an option.
They can’t be put in POW camps on the mainland, unless they are re-classified as prisoners of war, which means following the Geneva Convention rules for treatment of same.
I don’t know if there is precedent for re-classifying people held extrajudicially for years as POWs, the Geneva Convention makes it clear that it applies from the moment the prisoner is captured:
…but doesn’t address the issue of applying the status after a period of unlawful detention.
He didn’t say that he was *more *credible, but that he wasn’t any less. In one case the general is credible but ultimately self-serving, in the other he’s credible and more principled than average.
IOW the state of the guy’s moral compass has zip to do with how credible he is.
Al Qaeda detainees cannot ever be classified as Geneva POWs. It’s not possible via the mechanisms of the Conventions (eg they are not a high contracting party - a State or even a proclaimed State). They can certainly be afforded all the rights of POWs (or more) and there’s no reason why they can’t be detained inside the US, including a federal prison. However, not in the general population and would need a few other tweaks to confinement. For example, we held Manuel Norega as a POW in a federal prison.
No, they are not “innocent” in the eyes of the law. And I have ever right as to state my opinion that they are guilty as you do to proclaim the innocence. Additionally, my claim is supported by the fact that at least 5 of the prisoners recently RELEASED from from git’mo are convicted war criminals. Not presumed guilty, they actually plead guilty, or were convicted in a court of law. Are you really naive enough to think the remaining prisoners there are just innocent bystanders swept up in the fog of war? Really?
What the hell are you talking about? I think it’s pretty clear my argument is that these people have taken arms against or conspired to do harm to the US. I think the vast majority have actually committed crimes.
