Are you disputing the claim that US agents tortured detainees to death?
Here’s a report outlining some of the evidence that they did [pdf warning]. This does not include the documents obtained by the ACLU in 2007, which pretty much corroborate the report.
Well, we started out discussing Guantanamo, so I dispute anyone there was tortured to death, and I dispute the freedom to offer up claims of any kind in GD without citing them when asked.
That report uncritically accepts the worst testimony against the US.
But it’s perfectly acceptable as a cite.
No, it doesn’t do that at all. In most cases, there is only one available version of the events, which is the one put out by the military itself. Much of what is stated in the report is corroborated by CID and NCIS investigations. In other cases, all there is to go on is the pathologist’s report.
But I don’t find any examples where HRF has accepted some evidence over other evidence without any analysis or examination. Can you point them out for us?
The leader of the US government does have that sort of power, and at the time it included benefit of the doubt based on established credibility, too.
Your point?
Not a good choice of argument, pard. The UN did not authorize such a war.
Try harder.
Martin, if you could point to some place in either law or the GC that you are confident covers these people, please do so.
Ravenman, please try to be serious here, okay?
(re: UN Resolution 1368); You’re right. That resolution did not authorize a war and I did not say it did, but maybe it looks implied in my post. My point is that they can authorize war in those three situations. They used the same exact language used to authorize war to describe the attacks on 9/11. It’s not by accident. So, the UN used language previously used to describe war to describe terrorist attacks. They did this before the AUMF.
The rest of my post speaks for itself.
Now this is good. Because Der Trihs is substantially correct (and so is Martin Hyde).
Very, very, simply, there are two competing principles in war. The principle of military necessity and the principle of humanity. They sit on opposite ends of a seesaw and must balance each other. Military necessity is doing the things necessary to win a war. You’re allowed to kill first. Civilians can be killed in collateral damage. Bad stuff. Another thing is detaining the enemy. It’s a principle so deep you don’t need to even have a law about it, it’s a part of customary international law. However, you can’t just do whatever it takes to win a war; you must balance “what it takes,” with treating your enemy humanely (ie, Article 3). A part of that is not torturing a captured enemy (no matter what he might know), giving them trials to determine their Geneva status (POW, civilian, ect). Good stuff. It’s also a part of customary international law; you don’t need to have a law or be a signatory to the conventions. It always applies in every war.
Bush (ie, his advisers) on the one hand used cust. int. law to say: We have the power to detain the enemy indefinitely. They did. But, they bent over backwards to state why they did not have to treat people humanely. Invoked customary international law on the one hand, said why customary international law did not apply to the US on the other. They did this of course so they could waterboard, ect while acting legally.
It’s not a terrible argument to say cust. int. law shouldn’t/doesn’t apply to the US. It’s complicated how it applies to the US and you can certainly argue it doesn’t. It’s the picking and choosing that’s bad lawyering; especially when the principles you pick are all on one side of the seesaw. That’s wrong and it won’t stand (we all know now it did not).
It must seem that we that us “liberals” disagreed a few years ago.
My recollection of my opinion was that the prisoners were either subject to the international laws of war, and being treated as prisoners of war, or as accused criminals. Either way, there was a set of rights. Additionally, prisoners of war can be accused of criminal acts and war crimes, but that may enable both kinds of charges, but in any event, they are still subject to the Geneva Conventions, of which the US is a signatory.
As criminally charged prisoners of war, they are entitled to Red Cross visits, legal counsel, etc.
My problem with the Bush administration (and the Obama administration to the extent they are doing it) is that under the Idiot these people were essentially treated as badly as heretics in the Dark Ages: thrown in dungeons, tortured and humiliated with no consideration to our humanity, much less theirs.
Okay, you guys want a cite from the Geneva Convention:
Sorry, you can’t get there from here.
Ever since 1969, it’s ALWAYS been correct to call a Republican President evil, for any reason, or no reason at all. 
That’s from Additional Protocol I. It’s the equivalent of Article 3 (that’s been referred to) and provides baseline protections. API applies in State v. State wars (APII in non-state v. state). The DOJ tried to argue API 75 was not apart of cust. int. law which I briefly explained a few posts up (which I just call Article 3 for the sake of consistency and because it’s for non-state v. state wars).
Today this protocol is followed (the Article 3 equivalent), and has been for some years. It was not when all this started, though.
He said your statement was false, not that you lied. If you believe another poster has insulted you, please report it and let the moderators handle it.
And the ACLU’s corroborating documents which were linked to in the next line?
I’ve tried to be serious. But your latest round of arguments – that the AUMF was actually about Iraq; that the AUMF was actually a law enforcement resolution; that the AUMF can’t be read literally because Dick Cheney was trying to pull a fast one on Congress; that the AUMF wasn’t really intended to cover war against other countries; are all such incoherent, contradictory, senseless, and unsupportable statements that it is hard not to laugh at them.
That was a link to the summary page containing dozens of different FOIA request results. I picked on that seemed to be relevant: “4/16/2008 - Documents Obtained By ACLU Describe Charges Of Murder And Torture Of Prisoners In U.S. Custody.” That led to six different PDF links.
I clicked the first: “www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/20080416/CID_Gardez_Report_1.pdf” This took me to an 80-page PDF of mainly handwritten statements, difficult to read because of the redacting and the handwriting. Still, I persisted for five pages, and found nothing supporting the claim. Without a more specific cite, I’m not going to credit this at all.
But you obviously do, so what specific parts did you find compelling?
Not if you haven’t actually comprehended, or even read, any of the posts you’ve replied to with mere derision rather than argument or even handwaving. But, since you don’t really want to be taken seriously, I won’t.
Here’s all of Article 3:
Can you point out the part where it authorizes the confinement of unlawful enemy combatants?
Detention of combatants is part of customary international law. The Geneva Convention sets rules for treatment of detainees, it doesn’t dictate who may and who may not be subject to detention.
I might as well ask you for where in the Geneva or Hague Conventions is specifically says that soldiers may use rifles to shoot at one another. The treaties don’t give permission for such things, they assume they are being done because, like, that’s the nature of war and stuff; and therefore the treaties set regulations for HOW stuff like that should be carried out.
Okay, so you were invoking the Geneva Convention until I quoted it. Now you’re invoking “customary international law”. So can you provide a cite? Quote us some international law that authorizes the detention of unlawful enemy combantants?
See for example the Army Field Manual on the Laws of Land Warfare. These selected quotes are from the 1975 version, just to remove any question of whether or not these instructions are some evil Bush-Cheney plot:
Just to be clear on what customary international law is (in case you aren’t used to dealing with the concept), it is a body of laws based on general principles that are widely accepted by nations in general. It is not a set of written treaties that one may refer to by article and section number.
Customary international law is like traditions of behavior that are commonly understood, sort of in the same way that people in the US know that they are supposed to wipe their feet before entering someone’s home or not to sneeze into one’s hands and then shake hands with somebody – there’s no written law against such things, but everyone agrees that they aren’t really done.
Therefore, the citations for customary international law may appear in things like Army Field Manuals, academic writings, exchanges of diplomatic notes between countries, and so forth. I just don’t want the particular cite I chose to be a source of confusion.
Ex Parte Quirin discusses that issue in depth.
“By universal agreement and practice the law of war draws a distinction between the armed forces and the peaceful populations of belligerent nations and also between those who are lawful and unlawful combatants. Lawful combatants are subject to capture and detention as prisoners of war by opposing military forces. Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful.”
They cited additional treatises on international law, including: “Great Britain, War Office, Manual of Military Law, ch. xiv, 445- 451; Regolamento di Servizio in Guerra, 133, 3 Leggi e Decreti del Regno d’Italia (1896) 3184; 7 Moore, Digest of International Law, 1109; 2 Hyde, International Law, 654, 652; 2 Halleck, International Law (4th Ed. 1908 ) 4; 2 Oppenheim, International Law, 254; Hall, International Law, 127, 135; Baty & Morgan, War, Its Conduct and Legal Results (1915) 172; Bluntschli, Droit International, 570 bis.”
This seems like a fairly meaningless argument since we’ve shown no interest in demonstrating that the people that we’ve grabbed are combatants at all, “lawful” or otherwise.