Well, Sailor in a word, no, I have no major heartburn with people being detained on the battlefield.
At what point in the process do you think that detaining people becomes an abuse? (Serious question, I would value your answer.)
‘Sarge, get these people out of here and set up the machine gun.’
‘Sarge, we’re taking fire, get these people to the rear.’
‘Sarge, these guys look fishy to me, get them to the rear and hand them over to the MPs.’
‘Sarge, these guys were handed to us by our rather fishy allies. Get them back to the MPs.’
‘Colonel this whole area is too dangerous for our prisoners. Get them on a plane to Cuba.’
‘Colonel, if we release these guys the locals will tear them to sheds. We need to keep them until we can make a decision.’
I see little distinction between these. Military law is not civil law, soldiers are not policemen, we are not arresting (nor charging nor trying them). We are just holding them.
Unfair? Sure. Rough? Yep. Worthy of much note in all the maelstrom of suffering in any war? No, not really.
Now I am open to arguments based on these guys being mistreated. Anyone who harms a prisoner should be punished. Still, that is not the meat of the matter here. The central complaint you have (if you will allow me to summarize your point) is the fact that these people were detained.
I have no problem with that.
As before, it is getting late here and I may not reply to your next post. I have a few things to this evening before bedtime.
Since I’m having a fantastically boring day at work, I guess I’ll give these an answer.
Expires in hours, maybe days.
Again, expires in hours or days. Maybe months in a protracted war - the kind we really don’t get anymore.
The implication being, of course, that the MPs will take a look at the situation, make a decision, and act on it.
Again, a decision will be made by someone more qualified to deal with the situation. The MPs are for that, an average soldier isn’t.
If the USA can’t protect the prisoners in Afghanistan or Iraq (or keep them detained - your example isn’t too clear), how can they protect the civilians of that area from bandits, guerillas, and the like?
Maybe I’ve watched too many police movies, but to me “protective custody” is putting them in a hotel and keeping them protected from assassins. Not sticking them in a prison. Besides, it goes right back to the previous answer - if we can’t protect a small select group of people, how can we protect the rest of the country?
Anyways, the point is, not one of your situations above requires any sort of extended detainment. Certainly not two years. Probably not even two months.
Indefinitely. With no reasons given for holding them (discovery, interviewing possible witnesses, etc) except that they might be a threat. The people who decide whether or not they’re a threat are those who have alot to gain by holding up these guys as boogeymen.
And no, they’re not charging them, either. That strikes you as a good thing? They’re not charging them because charges require evidence, a trial, and resolution. They know if they do that, they can’t win, so their solution to a game they can’t win is to just postpone it forever.
It’s noteworthy because these are people being held indefinitely without any rights at all by the US government. Nobody even knows who these people are! Nobody knows what they’ve done.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Jose Padilla in the same situation? Isn’t he a US citizen?
Do you see the crossover here?
And if they’re mistreated, how are you going to find out about it? These people are nothing more than numbers. Beat them as badly as you want…just wait six months for them to heal, and then release them. Then you’ll get geniuses like Beagle claiming that they obviously weren’t mistreated…because they have no bruises.
I have a problem when the definition of war is “anything we want it to mean”. A lot of these guys were not holding arms and were not even in anything you could call a war zone. The US government has decreed that that whole planet is a war zone and that there is a “war on terrorism” going on and that it justifies anything they want to justify. The guys who were caught shooting guns in Afghanistan or iraq were held there. The US government has held thousands of enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq and I am not going to get into that (even though I could) because that is another thread for another day. What we are talking about here is people who have been taken not because they were actually fighting but because the US government suspects some of them conceivably could be, maybe, thinking about doing some bad things. That is what the people in Gitmo are about. And because the US government feels it would be difficult or maybe impossible to present any proof or evidence then they dispense with the niceties of due process. These people are suspected by the US government of having committed crimes or of planning to do so but the US government dispenses with the entire concept of due process and of human rights and that is unacceptable for a civilised country. America should not be like the Soviet Union or like Communist China.
The fact is that when the USA requested the extradition of some “extremely dangerous terrorists” from some European countries, those extraditions were denied because the evidence submitted by the USA was insufficient to laughable. the fact is that the evidence from those who have been liberated from Gitmo so far is that they were probably innocent.
Civilised nations have a process for determining guilt and it is the burden of the State to prove the guilt. All this is being trampled on in Guantanamo by the government of the USA. They are doing it off US soil and only to foreign nationals because they know full well it is immoral, very probably illegal according to US law and because if it were done on US soil or to US citizens the American people would not stand for it.
This is quite much worse than the infamous McCarthy era when nothing half so bad happened. It is a shame and the USA will recognize it as such once the hysteria is over.
it is also damaging to the image and the relations of the USA abroad and should be stopped if only for that reason.
I think I will have to take issue with Merijeek’s excellent post that the term ‘Enemy Combatant’ has been used exclusively by the Administration in lieu of the legally correct ‘Illegal Combatant.’ I think (and offer no proof at all) the terms have been used more or less interchangeably.
However Sailor has a point. Legalism can be meaningless (although they can also be quite meaningful) in the real world.
I remain unchanged in my opinion the simple fact of detention on the battlefield is somehow wrong. I was an Army officer and as unfair as it sounds, if I needed to take people off the battlefield, I ought not have been questioned on the need to do so.
Heck, it would be legal and right for me to kill an armed enemy, how could it be wrong to order someone detained? Such an order would be illegal under civil law, but we all admit that different standards apply on the battlefield.
As I said, it can hardly be otherwise.
Now, as I said, I am open to argument about the treatment of detainees. There is no excuse to be needlessly cruel.
Let me, if you will, change the focus of this thread a bit. Do you believe the gist of the charges in the article in the recent British papers? As these are among the first eyewitness reports we need to give them a serious look, although not an uncritical one.
Frankly the tone of many of these stories is quite different from the style I would expect of American reporters. The men were reported to be in a ‘safe house.’ What does that mean? It sounds like breathless hyperbole to me.
Of course there are kernels of truth in these reports, but there are also many charges that seem to be simple jail-house rumor (limbs being hacked off too high, hookers, menstrual blood).
(This is not to say the fellows don’t believe those things, it simply means they may be wrong.)
As I said, I have no problem with the detention of people seized on the battlefield, I do have a problem with possible mistreatment. Further I simply doubt the truth of these first reports coming from these British guys.
The US has held these people at Guantanamo for going on three years now without either according them status as prisoners of war of charging them with crimes, while holding them in legal limbo outside of US jurisdiction. I have no doubt that some, if not many or most of them, in fact are deserving of indefinite detention for actual crimes, even if it is as members of a conspiracy to commit said crimes. The treatment of simply holding them outside US jurisdiction is something I’d support if it were simply a matter of waiting a small time to determine their actual status. Two and a half years without any clarification of what legal status they are to be afforded is, however, getting to be a bit of blight on the rule of law. Frankly, charge them with crimes, either civil or war crimes, or afford them status as actual prisoners of war, not as some nebulous “enemy combatants”.
What about a guy we detain on the battlefield who is not worthy of POW status (as defined by the Hague Convention I cited) and who is a threat to the US? We know/think/suspect that if we release him he will continue to fight against us? We cannot charge him since fighting on a battlefield is no crime.
We cannot POW him (to coin a verb) since he is not a soldier. We can’t charge him. We can’t release him. What do we do?
How about a soldier we do POW? Can we keep him cooped up forever? It looks like this was in Afghanistan will never really end.
…as easy as this sounds, can you provide a cite that says that any of the Guantanamo prisoners were captured on the battlefield? And I don’t mean random soundbytes from the administration…
While it’s nice you liked my post, I think you’ve missed the main point.
This is an undeclared war against an unspecified and continually changing enemy.
The bullshit “War on Terrorism” is a war that will never be over, and I’d like to think that any person on the SDMB will be smart enough to understand that.
It will never end.
So, how long do these guys get held?
You keep refering to a “battlefield” situation. Yes, a battlefield is a special place. Detaining people to get them out of the way is a “good” thing to do. The two main reasons it’s a “good” thing to do is because it protects (presumably) innocent civilians, and prevents those (possibly not) innocent civilians from interfering with your side’s ability to fight.
So, when is a battlefield not a battlefield? Maybe when the battle is over? When will this battle be over? Well, shit, never! Afghanistan has been a battlefield for over twenty yearrs!
So, you’ve got people being held indefinitely in legal limbo. Will they be released if they’re innocent of any crimes? How? Who is going to determine if they’re innocent? They don’t even get fucking lawyers!
Umm…what happens if you charge him? Is he going to go to jail?
Hint: He’s already there.
They’re practically hostages. Actually, they’re less than hostages. At least hostages might be treated well in the interests of keeping a valuable commodity in good condition.
Well, what would you expect to be done with a USA Soldier in a similar situation? What about a USA civlian detained at a random roadblock in Alaska after Canada invades and completes their conquest of it?
This country’s actions have put them on the level of North Vietnam in their treatment of POWs and “suspected bad guys”.
I get tired of this. Paul in Saudi, you are just repeating the same “detention on the battlefield” crap and ignoring the objections being presented. There is no proof the people being held in Gitmo were “caught in the battlefield” and I do not think the US government even says so so I think you are making it up. AFAIK the US government accuses those people of belonging to Al Qaeda and plotting to blow up stuff. The US government says they are guilty of belonging to a criminal organization. The US government does not say they are combatants “caught on the battlefield” so your repeating this just reeks of dishonesty and of not wanting to see reality. I’m tired of this silliness.
As for American soldiers captured, I would point out (most) American soldiers meet the 1899 Hague Convention requirements to be considered soldiers. Since these fellows do not they put us in an awkward place.
Until their status is determined, we cannot try them. All we can do is detain them. While we detain them we must give them all the protections due to the highest protected class, that is POW.
If the Detaining Power determines they are not soldiers, and so not protected, they will be given lawyers and given trials. If found guilty of some sort of crime they will then be imprisoned.
POWs are not in prison, they are not being punished. They are in detention facilities and are simply being detained. Not jails. Criminals go to jails.
I fail to see how these guys being held indefinitely are in any worse condition (legally) than Germans being held in the US in 1943. Those guys were not charged with crimes. They did not get lawyers. They were detained for more than twice as long as these fellows in Cuba have been.
Some say this war will never end. I regret my crystal ball is on the blink right now and must rely on others for such predictions. Further I do not see how the length of the war has much to do with it.
Joe, you raise good points. All in all the Conventions do not address you points as to the nature of a battlefield and so on. These documents, some more than a century old, need some serious rewriting.
You seem to be proposing that these fellows be charged with crimes or be released. That (charging POWs with the ‘crime’ or fighting) would be a very large violation of the Conventions.
OK, so I open it up for further discussion, given that you cannot charge these guy with fighting against us, that is no crime; what would you do with these guys?
A slight shift in topic, but they’ve finally gotten around to dropping all charges against James Yee , the Guantanmo chaplain who got busted espionage. For a while there it looked as if the Feds were going to try to lock him up for Porn and adultry rather than admit their case had collapsed.
I wonder if Capt. Yee will now be heading back to Guantanamo to tend to those muslim brothers who were not so fortunate as to have been charged with a bogus crime?
Since Paul in Saidi is not bothering to address the points I raise i will just point out again that
If there is no limits to what falls within the scope of this nebulous “war” and the entire world is a “war zone” so that anyone can be detained anywhere and any act can be considered an act of “war”
and the US executive can say the magic words “enemy combatant” and that means no access to the courts or any rights to due process
THEN
the constitution and all other laws guaranteeing any ts are meaningless. The US government can, in fact, legally lock up someone indefinitely without charges or justification.
I will note that this only happened in the Soviet Union (gulags), Communist China and similar dictatorships. I do not know that this has been possible in any western democracy in the last century or more (if I am mistaken I would like to be corrected). I do not believe even during WWII the UK or other allies did this. (The USA had the infamous Japanese internment camps though).
I will repeat again for the record that I believe many of these “enemy combatants” were nowhere near any combat zone and some were taken in other countries than Iraq, even in the USA. They are in fact being accused of crimes by the US government but they are not being given a chance to prove their innocence. None of them are accused of being combatants in the field AFAIK.
In the months following 9/11 the USA requested some extraditions from Some European countries ( I recall UK, Spain, Germany IIRC) and they were all denied for lack of evidence. This makes me think that probably many of those in Gitmo are quite innocent.
The problem is, there has been no effort made to determine their status. At the rate it is going, I doubt that there will be any effort made, they are being held in indefinite limbo outside of US jurisdiction. If they are criminals, charge them. If they are POW’s, afford them such status. If they are POW’s accused of war crimes, charge them accordingly.
For starters, German POWs captured in 1943 were treated as POWs, you might want to re-check the link I provided for the conditions of their treatment vis a vis the Gitmo situation. They also did not spend twice as long in detainment as those held in Cuba, in fact the Cuban detainees have already spent as long in detention as German POWs from 1943 did.
What crime? Fighting against the Americans? That is not a crime.
I see no important way in which these detainees are not being treated as POWs. Until their status is determined, they must be given the full protections of POWs.
One of those protections is the protection against being tied by the Detaining Power. One you would seem to do away with.
I think Paul in Sudi’s lies and dishonesty have become quite apparent. He continues to ignore the truth which is that the USA does not consider the people held in Guantanamo as Prisoners of war, it accuses them of being “terrorists” and planning to kill American civilians (which is a common crime). The US government does not claim these people were caught in any battlefield fighting US forces. It is simply dishonest to claim otherwise. The whole of Paul in Saudi’s arguments are based on lies.
The fact is that the US government accuses the prisoners of , in Rumsfeld’s words, being “lethal terrorists involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans, the hardest of the hard core”.
The fact is they are accused of having committed crimes and they are not being given due process of law.
The fact is that all evidence so far indicates they are probably being tortured.
The fact is that this has been condemned by the whole world.
The fact is Paul in Saudi continues to ignore all this and repeat his lies. I think this is a pretty good indication that what is being done in Guantanamo by the government of the USA is indefensible.
You are uneducated on the legalities of this bizarre little corner of human affairs. Trying to fit this new war against civilization into the framework of very old treaties and conventions is difficult at best.
Even given good will, peoples opinions will differ. In your case, lacking good will, a differing a opinion is worthy of a personal attack.
By the way, are you going to join the paid-subscription scheme?