Perhaps you could explain for me how that comment is relevant to the discussion - I’m not seeing it.
Apparently many conservatives find it so.
The Bush Admin. has committed a clear and egregious violation of the cruel and unusual punishment clause a lot lately. I find it difficult to believe it would be stretched to cover the death penalty if “cruel and unusual punishment” can’t even manage to cover torture.
Ah - OK. Well, some are being punished for it. Though not likely, I would (naively) hope and expect that the punishment for breaking the law would extend up through the ranks as necessary. Also, I’d note that it is law that has been broken there - the U.S. Constitution’s protections do not extend to the the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Something posted by Kevin Drum last night that nicely captures why there isn’t anything all that particularly special about what is required to be a solid Supreme Court justice:
Now I don’t agree with the last two sentences, since it seems to me that (a) any long-practicing litigator is going to have plenty of practical experience in interpreting constitutional law, and (b) whether Miers is “anti-intellectual” (which would certainly be a bad thing) is still up in the air. But Con Law ain’t rocket science, folks.
The local alternative weekly, the Dallas Observer, has this to say about Harriet Miers. It paints her as someone with rather conservative religious beliefs and a great deal of respect for civil rights.
So, it’s OK for us to torture them brown skinned furriners, is it? I suspected a lot of people thought that. To me the Constitution is binding on U.S. citizens … we aren’t supposed to go around torturing people … no matter who those people might be.
Yeah, that’s what I said. :rolleyes:
If you are going to post such things as:
it might be well to include a disclaimer such as, “although such conduct is of course morally indefensible and should be forbidden by US law in some way.” Otherwise, simple folk like myself might think you are trying to excuse torture of non-citizens.
I suppose I assumed that simple folk such as yourself might understand this:
Frankly, I do not see how the Dems can lose vis a vis the Supreme Court. If we get a moderate or even, Og willing, a left-leaning Court, we are spared the troglodyte decisions of folks like Scalia and Thomas. If we get a conservative court, it will likely overturn Roe v. Wade, giving the Dems so much political power that we will be able to undo legislatively whatever the trogs on the court attempt to do by judicial fiat.
Maybe the provisions of the Constitution itself don’t apply. But Article VI says the treaties to which we are signatories “shall be the supreme Law of the Land,” and those treaties include the Geneva Conventions. Which just might have a few clauses that apply to our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Now that’s a good point.
Into what category of the Geneva Convention do the detainees at Abu G fall?
I’m absolutely positive that torturing prisoners to death is against the conventions. We’ve got at least three instances of that so far. (They were in the ‘and elsewhere’ rather than at Abu Ghraib specifically.)
Do the Geneva Conventions prohibit torturing a country’s own, internal prisoners to death?
That is, suppose we were discussing Joe Pedophile, a US citizen and resident of Virginia, arrested in Virginia for the rape of an eight-year-old. The court sentences him, in our hypothetical, to death by torture.
Does the Geneva Convention prohibit that?
In other words, I don’t doubt that the Geneva Convention prohibits torturing to death those people to whom it applies. My question to you is: to whom does the Geneva Convention apply?
Note that just calling them detainees does not automatically make them “non-prisoners”, except in a very Orwellian sense.
That’s the third convention which I just referenced, btw.
It does for internal conflicts. For the example you’ve just mentioned, I don’t think that the Geneva convention applies. But we’ve not declared war on paedophelia, at least not yet. IMO, if you’ve captured someone for something you’ve declared a war on, they are a prisoner of war. If they’re captured in the field by soldiers, even moreso. If they are arrested by a recognized police organization, then they should be given standard US constitutional protections while they are in our custody.
OK. So if they are prisoners of war, then their treatment is violative of the Geneva Convention.
The term “prisoners of war” is defined in Article 4 of the Geneva Convention.
So far as I can determine, “insurgents” – people who simply pick up a gun or a bomb and attack American forces – do not fit into any of the definitions of “prisoner of war”.
Into which specific Article 4 category do you claim they fit?
This is evidently a matter of some contention, hence appeals to the conventions should not be so lightly brushed aside.