So… are they to be incarcerated for life because of a threat that they have yet to carry out? And why does it have to be addressed in a special law? Don’t you have good laws for prosecuting people who make deadly threats? And do these carry incarceration for life as penalty?
I think that Gates think that the international community objects to Guantanamo on the basis of its location (and it couldn’t be better, location-wise). If abuses to international laws and human rights occur elsewhere the international community will still have the same opinion.
That was the quote that I disliked the most: “we might lose in court, so let’s rig the dice”. In every fair justice of system people have “the potential of them being released”, why else have a court then?
I am trying to be generous in my interpretations. Perhaps Gate is just a REALLY bad communicator.
Some people were acquitted in the Nuremberg trials. Had Churchill had his way they would have been hang even if innocent. It troubles me that this administration seem to ignore that lesson.
And I am going to take a moment and derail my own thread to say that I am so disappointed of the US as of the last years. To me is like discovering somebody I had in good esteem was a thief, or a wife-beater. So much for looking up to you, I’d rather look up to Cuba now (slight exaggeration).
I know that the average US citizen may or may not be a bad person, but darn, you are making it so hard to love your country.
Well, it “breeds lawyers” only because it “breeds court cases”. Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, we’re talking about people who would not even have the benefit of a trial prior to their [possibly erroneous] conviction. Since these people would be given actual trials, most (if not all) of them would need lawyers.
Why is it automatically a bad thing, if it “breeds lawyers”?
IMO, conventions can be venerable and need to be treated with care, as well. I’m not saying that all conventions should be enforced as laws (that would be silly), but in cases where we’re talking about conviction, imprisonment, etc. it seems to make sense.
And we can take them as they come. It’s not like we don’t have laws that can be construed as “weird” already, anyway.
Perhaps I had better explain where I am coming from.
Laws apply to citizens of a State, also to people within that State (on the assumption that by being there they have given implicit consent). They should be enforced rigorously.
UK Laws do not apply to citizens of Equador in Zambia.
Conventions, the most memorable of which is the Geneva Convention, apply to citizens of States that have signed the Convention. A Mau Mau guerilla is not entitled to the same ‘protection’ as a WWII German soldier captured by the USA.
Human Rights are a load of idealistic principles that have been drafted rather than evolved, slinging them on top of an established body of Law causes havoc, as it has done in the UK.
‘International Laws’ are a woolly concept, they entitle Serbian citizens to be tried for actions committed in Bosnia by a bunch of people sitting in the Hague - they are trans National - basically poking their noses into other people’s business.
The USA appears to understand that it does not want third parties imposing their ‘laws’ on USA citizens within the USA, although it does appear to think that it can impose its own laws on other people.
Human Rights are a menace to legal systems as they are an appeal to a higher authority than the Nation State.
I beg your pardon. Signatories are obliged to observe the Conventions even when at war with non-signatories.
So what? The nation-state’s courts still get to decide when, where and how they apply. Or is your objection to “higher authority” such as the International Criminal Court?
Would you kindly inform the current Spanish government please? We have some… ah, interesting recent laws regarding chimpanzee rights which were taken for a collective joke, at first. Nope, them Socialists are serious.
Possibly the scariest thing about this is that it doesn’t matter if they were guilty of the original crimes. I can see a reasonably peaceful person turned vehemently and violently anti-American simply by us locking him up for so long and treating him as we have. In that case we created the terrorist by the imprisonment, but need to keep him in prison in order to protect us from that terrorist we created.
This is like the whole the Iraq war. The only good way out was not to have gotten in in the first place.
I can almost imagine a Muslim Yossarian in Guantanamo: as long as he claims that he is not an enemy of the United States he cannot be trusted because, well, how could he not have become one after all he had to endure? But if he told anyone that, yes, now he is an enemy …
That sentence is meaningless.