Shouldn’t they be suing their own government for not taking the necessary actions to prevent this from happening in the first place?*
*Just a thought. I’m not wedded to it.
As a rule, they’ve tried and failed to stop it. As they aren’t the ones doing the damage, they don’t get the blame.
No, the law should have nothing to do with justice, ethics and responsibilty. :rolleyes:
OK, to be honest, it should. But as a practical matter, it does not on an increasingly frequent basis.
It’s not shaky, it’s FUCKING PLAIN-AS-THE-NOSE-ON-YOUR-FACE OBVIOUS that Iraq was conquered and occupied as part of an illegal war of agression. This “shaky” stuff is just right wing bullshit, like all the other right-wing bulshit.
I think the so called justice system is really designed to come to a decision so that people can know what they can and can’t do. It has little to do with abstract justice.
Is this belief that you have consistent across the board, or situational? Because I can make a very good case that right now, in Iraq, the U.S. forces are trying to stop the violence and militias and insurgents are the ones doing the damage. Do the militias and insurgents get the blame for the suicide bombs and attacks on civilians going on, or is that still our fault?
Guantanamo Bay is Cuban territory. The US leases it by treaty and is scrupulous about sending the check for the rent to Havana every year, although I believe that Castro has never cashed any of the checks.
Both. Their fault for doing it, our fault for making it possible, not to mention arming and training them in some cases, such as the police who double as death squads. And we’ve killed plenty of civilians ourselves; we are not trying our best to stop the violence, especially since leaving would be a major way of doing that.
A fig leaf. Cuba may have title to Guantanamo Bay but they can’t come on the base and enforce Cuban laws. It is as much under US control as is Chillicothe, OH.
Not a direct response to the OP, and I’m sure debated before, but page one brings up the “illegal war”. Can anyone tell me what law was broken in this latest forray into Iraq? What law, and which country enacted, the law that disallows military action?
I’m not hijacking the thread into a debate on the war itself*, but rather looking for what law was broken.
*If we’re talking US law, keep in mind only Congress can declare war. They didn’t. However, Congress did authorize military force in any magnitude to fight terrorism. (An open-ended quest, obviously.) So it really isn’t a war with Iraq. If it really is illegal, those voting for it should be prosecuted. But that ain’t gonna happen. The lawmakers are lawyers and know how to cover their asses. Say what you want about the situation, but “illegal war” is tired. Put it to bed.
The US is a signatory to the United Nations Charter. That Charter forbids attacks of one member on another except in case of imminent threat of attack or when authorized by the UN.
The UN didn’t authorize the use of force and the idea of a threat of imminent attack is pretty far out. However, there is no one around to bring the US to account so, de facto if not de jure the was is legal.
You’re a little late in, but welcome to the club. I’ve been painfully aware for a long time that everytime support for or even active involvment in massacre, torture, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, genocide, etc… is requested, there’s no lack of volunteers. Everywhere, no matter how supposedly civilized and educated the population is. German intellectuals, Yugoslavian soldiers and Rwadan farmers will be equally willing to hack to pieces the designated ennemy du jour.
At any time, in any country, if the population feels stressed and the public authorities drop some oil on the fire, you’re at risk of being hanged at the nearest lampost with a “traitor”, “ennemy of the people” or “heretic” sign around your neck, under the cheers of your previously friendly neighbors. The varnishes of civilization and of the rule of law are very thin, indeed.
It often gives me this “please, stop the planet, I want to gett off” feeling. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the time, I forget about all this. Until an artticle in the paper, a comment overheard in a cafe or a post on this board reminds me of the grim reality. 
Um…you asked a question, I answered it. If you don’t like the answer, fine, but it is what it is.
I got the impression that David Simmons was asking a rhetorical question there, It seems that now it is you who is not liking the whole answer. BTW, how the US acquired Guantanamo is also a reprehensible chapter in the history of the US IMO.
And you are talking out your fucking dumb ass. As a lawyer I can tell you, a court of law can adjudicate as to a person’s legal rights.
Of course it is their fault, but it is also our fault in the sense that none of it would be happening if we had just left their country alone.
Actually, the court is arguably right about Rumsfeld being immune to lawsuits over his actions while in office. There is such a thing as sovereign immunity. (But it is not unlimited.)
I don’t understand what you’re saying with the first part, “not liking the answer”; and as to the second, I lose sleep nightly over the injustice that was the Spanish-American war. :rolleyes:
The foundation of rights in the United States is natural law, and a belief in natural rights that all mankind possess by virtue of being human.
The first ten amendments were passed (generally) to enshrine certain rights in a fixed document, but the belief of most of the founders was that all men had these rights via virtue of their humanity, and that while they were enshrining them in a document that document was not the guarantor of the rights nor was it what created the rights. One argument against the bill of rights, back in the time it was passed, was the worry that enumerating certain rights would leave subsequent governments with the impression that unenumerated rights did not exist, that by defining X right and not defining Y right, you were saying people didn’t have a right to Y, when that was definitely not the desire result.
That’s why, within the Bill of Rights you have the ninth amendment, which reads:
In practice though, every one recognizes all governments place restrictions on rights, or makes outright exceptions to them. You have the right to liberty in all western democracies, but likewise all western democracies imprison their citizens for various offenses.
The Constitution spells out that the writ of habeas corpus cannot be denied except in certain situations, and those situations have happened in the past. During World War II and after the American Civil War we had Supreme Court cases that investigated the issue of the writ, and the government’s ability to detain people (be they citizens or foreign nationals.)
In light of those decisions it would appear that for the suspension of the writ to be kosher, at least under the SCOTUS microscope, the suspension would have to be legislative in nature, and could not simply be an executive order. The decisions that clarified that point lead directly to the Military Commissions Act which got so much press last year. The MCA is legislative approval for suspension of the writ for foreign nationals who are being held as enemy combatants.
The MCA suspends the writ for two classes of people. One, is persons held who have been determined by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal to be enemy combatants, the second is persons who are awaiting determination of their status before one of said tribunals. The biggest problem most people have with said tribunals is unlike say, a criminal trial where you are entitled to a trial and the government cannot make you wait an unreasonable amount of time, there is nothing preventing authorities from putting off a CSRTs for a very long period of time.
The writ is routinely denied to POWs, and this has always been the case. German and Italian POWs held in the United States were not entitled to the writ because they were being held for an entirely military purpose, to be kept out of hostilities and prevented from aiding their country in acts of war against us, but since they were proper and lawful soldiers they were not subject to any punishments but simply detention til the cessation of hostilities.
Where things get problematic, is in the past it was very obvious who was an enemy combatant most of the time. If you captured a guy in a German military uniform on the battlefield, it was quite obvious he was an enemy combatant, to be detained and kept as a POW until the cessation of hostilities. Since the GWOT is both an undeclared war, which may never have a declared cessation of hostilities, and since very few of our enemies in said war are wearing uniforms, it’s not easy to make the determination as to who is a combatant of a foreign power or not.
To get back to your original question:
Your right to petition for a writ in a U.S. court is indeed at the benevolence of the government (if not solely the President.) The problem with any right in any country is, no matter what legal protections exist, if the government itself is willing to do immoral things it is very hard to do anything about it. Even in governments where specific prohibitions against certain government actions are spelled out, that doesn’t mean things can’t happen which make said government ignore those prohibitions. The scary truth is no matter where you are in the world, you’re at the mercy of the government. How many times have “enshrined rights” expanded or changed in countries around the world? How many times have strong leaders taken over a country and bent the organs of government to their will? It’s scary, and it happens.
But in this case, your rights aren’t really any lesser than those of an American citizen.