After further reading and remembering, I will concede a small point. These were differently authorized actions but NATO approved this one. And the UN endorsed the end result so I still have to say that this is very different than Authorizing Torture which is definitely a crime a War Crime
The only approval that matters is the UNSC, and that was never given. I’m not sure what you mean when you say “the UN endorsed the end result”. How does that come into play wrt international law or the UN Charter?
However, a Resolution proposed by Russia condemning the bombing was defeated in the Security Council 12-3, with only Russia, China, and Namibia voting in favor while Argentina, Bahrain, Brazil, Gabon, Gambia, Malaysia, and Slovenia, along with NATO members the US, Britain, France, Canada, and Netherlands voted against it.[17][18] In 1999, a Canadian law professor, Michael Mandel, filed a formal complaint of NATO war crimes with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia charging 67 NATO leaders with war crimes. These complaints were dismissed by the tribunal who claimed they had no jurisdiction over NATO.[citation needed]
The Council of State, the Supreme Court of Greece, found NATO guilty of war crimes for its 1999 bombing.[19]
[edit]
So we have parties that disagree, but as you see no one is ever going to be prosecuted for this because at best we have limited evidence of a war crime on NATO’s part, definite evidence of War Crimes on the part of the Serbians(and Croats and Bosnians)(just a short time before) and you think that sitting around and watching it all start again is a good idea? This can be debated ad nauseum and will be, but it comes nowhere near the unequivocal endorsement of Torture which is absolutely a war crime.
I wish you had been clearer in your earlier posts on this, but I for one see this as a continuation of the earlier conflicts and the prosecutors at the Hague agree
Cheers gotta go to work and will be on this in the AM
From what I’ve read, the UN Secretary General (Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the time) agreed to a policy of NATO retaliating via airstrikes against raids into UN-designated “safe areas”. What I can’t find was how this agreement was formulated. Was it an official resolution? Some other form of official policy? Or just Boutros-Ghali’s personal word on it?
It was Kofi Annan, and he played both sides. He said it was a good thing to do, but he wished they had gotten the UNSC approval.
We can hand wave all we want and come up with nice rationalizations, but we acted outside the rules of the UN. It’s certainly not as bad as Bush’s little Iraq adventure, but it’s the same general idea-- that as long as you’re big enough, you can do whatever you like.
Getting NATO to agree is certainly better than not, but the only way to be squeaky clean is to get the UNSC to approve the action. It’s tough to get that, but those are the rules. They’re supposed to make it difficult to go to war, even if shouldn’t be that difficult to get the US, China and Russia to agree on anything.
You’re thinking of the 1999 Kosovo airstrikes (Operation Noble Anvil). I’m talking about the first wave of retaliatory airstrikes in Bosnia in 1995 (Operation Deliberate Force).
The 6th and 8th amendments have no application to POWs/enemy combatants/detainees from armed conflict. That’s pretty obvious from the fact that founders themselves didn’t act like it did. In fact, their treatment of POWs was significantly worse.
Are you arguing that “enemy combatant” is not a valid designation? If so, what was the point of this statement?
I asked what makes you think that beneficial treatment of POWs was a “founding value.” You said it doesn’t matter because the Bush admin designated them enemy combatants. I accepted that argument at face value and changed my question to apply to enemy combatants. Now you’re saying that it doesn’t matter because they’re not enemy combatants? It seems like you’re contradicting yourself. Can you explain?
Is this interpretation backed by any legal precedent though? It seems to be contradicted in this document, though they do mention Ex parte Quirin.
Besides, according to Article 10 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which the US is a signatory:
I’m not aware of any legal precedent from the nation’s founding relating to the treatment of POWs/enemy combatants/detainees from armed conflicts. As I understand it – and as stated in the Wikipedia cites I provided earlier – the treatment of detainees for at least 100 years after the Revolutionary War was typically much, much more harsh than the current treatment of the detainees.
Really Not All That Bright said that he thinks the current treatment of detainees fails to live up to the founders’ values. I’m trying to determine why he thinks that the treatment of detainees is inconsistent with the founders’ values.
Ex Parte Quirin is from WW2, so it’s probably not helpful in determining what the founders’ values were. I was looking at how the founders and their contemporaries treated detainees as evidence of what their values were. If you’re aware of legal precedents from that time, I’d certainly welcome them.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was passed by the United Nations on Dec 10, 1948. So it’s not helpful in determining the US’s founders values on the treatment of detainees/POWs/etc. The founders were presumably all dead when the Universal Declaration on Human Rights was passed nearly 200 years later.
You can certainly argue that the treatment of detainees is inconsistent with the nation’s current values. But that’s a different argument. I’m just asking if there’s any evidence to support the argument that’s been made.
Sorry, I quoted the wrong segment:
While it’s a murky business stating that the founding fathers may have contravened the values of the constitution (and I have argued before that foreign aid is constitutional because Congress passed a law granting foreign aid while the founding fathers sat in it), couldn’t it be the case that they were simply ignoring principles of the constitution that they intended to grant to their enemy combatants? I mean if it were open season on enemy combatants, why even bring up the whole letters of marque thing?
First, I appreciate the fairness with which you’ve framed your point.
I agree that it’s possible that the framers contravened the values underlying the Constitution. They were human, and as such, could have succumb to the passions or temptations the Constitution is designed to avoid.
I didn’t mean to suggest that it was open season on enemy combatants. There certainly were principles of comity and convenience limiting the ways in which detainees were treated. The Wikipedia cite on the Revolutionary War suggests that the British initially treated American detainees as traitors and hung them; they stopped doing that once the American forces captured British soldiers. At that point, the British didn’t want to set a precedent that would give the Americans a justification for hanging the British soldiers. So there were some limits (albeit not in a document or law that I’m aware of).
The point that I was trying to make was more limited. I was merely wondering if there was any basis for suggesting that the current treatment of “enemy combatants”/POWs/whatever is inconsistent with the “founding values” of the US. It’s certainly possible, but I haven’t seen anything to indicate that their values were anything other than what they did.
I don’t know about the letters of marque. I suspect it was kind of an informal agreement among nations. You can’t prosecute someone for piracy if they’ve got a letter of marque, or else your own letters of marque won’t be recognized by other nations and your citizens will be prosecuted for piracy. I’m not aware of any formal agreements relating to letters of marque and – please correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t think letters of marque related to POWs/detainees.
My original point is that the right to speedy trial, habeas corpus, the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment and so on were among our founding values. I didn’t consider the WOT detainees as prisoners of war because the Bush administration went out of its way to say they weren’t. If they aren’t prisoners of war, they are civilians, and thus entitled to certain constitutional protections.
If the Bush Administration had classified them as prisoners of war (note that the Obama Administration has been equally bad in this regard), that would be fine. They didn’t. Instead, they redefined “enemy combatants”, a term which heretofore had referred to ordinary belligerents (who would have been accorded Geneva Conventions protections if captured).
The term unlawful combatant has historically been used to refer to civilians under arms. Those civilians have always enjoyed the same protections as other civilians.
In effect, they created a Catch-22, making up out of whole cloth a class of people who are neither entitled to constitutional protection nor POW protections. Apart from anything else, I would say that redefining a class of people out of existence is inconsistent with our founding values in and of itself.