Not if you are a non-citizen tortuee, Uncle Sam’s agents are the tortuers and outside US territory
José Padilla was/nominally still is a US citizen when first arrested, though now he’s now apparently on Planet Zongo acting “like a piece of furniture”:
So the same MO from Afghanistan through Guantanamo to Charleston, South Carolina - if anyone can get to Runsfeld I’d have thought it has to be US citizen Jose Padilla, though he might not personally know much about it.
Constitutionnal or not is precisely the issue.
Fine, but what is the basis for these rights? For instance, could the legislative branch vote a statute overnight, or, worse, could the president of te USA sign an executive order, depriving me from these rights? Because in the latter case, for instance, I don’t really have any guaranteed fundamental right. I just benefit from thanks to the benevolence of the POTUS, they could be rescinded at any moment, and I could be arbitrarily arrested, detained and tortured basically at the leisure of the “sovereign”.
Nope. It’s still illegal.
It’s also illegal for the President to declare war. But nobody can sue him over it.
You’d be one fool of an Iraqi, then. If some foreign country dropped a bomb on me, I’d certainly be grateful for the right to sue for damages.
So when can we expect someone will be prosecuted for the tortures detailed by the court in this case?
Now that I think about it, why not ? If it is an illegal war, why should Bush get off for the results of his crime ?
Point taken. I mixed my pronouns. I (myself) am glad that I (the Iraqi) can’t sue for damages.
Firstly, because the war’s legality is a political question which isn’t well-left up to the courts.
But even if it wasn’t. Let’s say that the military, in a legitimate war, drops a bomb on an enemy target, causing massive property damage to an adjacent house and killing two inhabitants. Allowing the surviving civilians to sue in US courts would unnecessarily hamper the war effort, because we’d have bomber pilots weighing the civil lawsuit consequences of military action. (“If I drop this bomb, I’d take out an enemy bridge, hamper supply lines, and achieve a major operational victory, but I’d need to pay $1,000,000 out of my own pocket as compensation, which I really can’t afford. I think I won’t drop the bomb.”)
If it’s an illegal war, President Bush can be impeached. That’s the remedy for “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
But I was talking about an illegal war. If lawsuits hamper the war effort in an illegal war ( or any aggressive war, really ), good.
Ooooh, big punishment. If I somehow killed tens of thousands of people, I think the penalty would be a bit worse than losing my job - a job Bush can’t keep much longer, anyway. The fact that Bush will remain free and rich for the rest of his life shows how utterly corrupt and unjust our system is.
Can you provide, clearly and without question, that George W. Bush has commited a crime? Not something shaky, like “went to war illegally”, as that may or may not be true.
But a clear and obvious illegal act?
IF you can, you should be talkign to lawyers.
But I’m willing to bet you can’t.
This (in particular the googles), along with sleep deprivation, is strikingly similar to the methods used in eastern Europe under the rule of Stalin, as illustrated by Costa Gavras movie “the admission”. Except for water boarding, that, on the other hand, the Gestapo was famous for using in France during WWII.
I think people must be really clueless for supporting such interrogation technics on the basis that they aren’t “real torture”. If they knew when and by whom they have been used in the past, I hope that many would change their minds. “we are just doing the same as the gestapo and the KGB, nothing more, don’t worry” wouldn’t fare well, I suspect.
I forgot to add. You might be able to prosecute him for treason, if you had the evidence. Would death be a good enough punishment for you?
I agree wholeheartedly, let me be perfectly clear.
Once again, I was responding to the phrase “If it’s an illegal war”; if it’s illegal it’s a crime by definition.
And if lying in order to get us into a war and torturing people and imprisoning people without charges isn’t a crime, then I fail to see why I should care if he’s commited a crime or not because then the legal system is a meaningless joke.
Why ? He’s above the law. Besides which, I’d probably just disappear if I tried.
“Do as I say, not as I do”.
For me the “not really torture” argumental line is that, if it really isn´t torture at all, why do it?, for shit and giggles? Aren´t his, hmmm… persuasion methods, based on the generation of pain and suffering so unbearable that the subject would do anything to make it stop?
If it really doesn´t hurt that much then it´s of no use at all.
(Off topic a bit. You know what is really scary about all this torture stuff? America has no shortage of young people who are perfectly willing to allow it, authorize it and do it. That creeps me out.)
They might be eager now, but if/when the day of reckoning comes, all that will presumably become “we were only following orders”.
Besides, it’s not really torture, ‘torture’ is when you put people on racks and stretch them, or insert stuff under their nails - what these kids are doing is using advanced interrogation techniques.
On sleep deprivation:
Dred Scott, anyone? To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if America lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their darkest hour.’
I’m not really surprised by this, since in the past SCOTUS has ruled that the Constitution doesn’t apply to US citizens outside of the US (meaning that CIA agents can burglarize your hotel room in Mexico City just for shits and giggles and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it in US courts). IIRC, the ruling was the result of the FBI kidnapping folks from the US vacationing overseas and bringing them back to the US.
Why this administration has such a chubby over being able to torture people I’ve no idea. From what I can tell, their efforts at extracting information in this manner has yielded exactly jack shit. No WMDs in Iraq, no sign of Osama, no peace in Iraq or Afghanistan, nothing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, TPTB claim that they’ve gotten useful information via torture, but they can’t tell us about it. I’d call “bullshit” on this matter, but that’s really not a strong enough term. “Blue whale shit” or “brontosaurus shit” would come closer to describing the volume of defecant being sprayed by the Shithead in Chief & Co. They’re more than happy to say that they’ve caught the “number three” or “number two” man in Al Qaiada or they’ve killed this or that asshat, so I have to believe that if they got any useful information, they’d be going, “See! See! We told you that torture was necessary!”
Let’s not forget that the one instance where we have something approaching torture, where an officer pretended to be crazy and fired off a gun close to the head of an Iraqi general, thus inspiring the general to spill information which prevented an ambush of US forces, resulted in that officer being “allowed” to resign from the service.
I hope like hell that whomever occupies the White House next does whatever they can to ship Shrub & Co. off to the Hague for trial.