How about $50? We can figure out how later.
You are asserting the Bush will issue a blanket pardon, applicable to unnamed people for unspecified crimes.
Is that correct?
A couple of quotes that might be on topic:
Countries avoid a declaration of war so they may claim, the laws and customs of war do not apply and need not be observed. Japan never declared war on China. Instead the fighting was euphemized as an incident. Chinese troops were not soldiers but bandits. One of the customs of war Japan was able to flout in this incident against bandits was acknowledgement that captured Chinese soldiers were prisoners of war. A 1933 army infantry textbook assured IJA officers that when they took prisoners, if you kill them there will be no repercussions. In a 1937 directive the army vice chief of staff stated: In the present situation, in order to wage total war in China, the empire will neither apply nor act in accordance with, all the concrete articles of the Treaty Concerning the laws and Customs of Land Warfare and Other Treaties Concerning the Laws and Regulations of Belligerency. The same directive ordered, Staff officers in China to stop using the term prisoner of war. As Pulitzer-prize winning historian Herb Blix pointed out, Hirohito himself supported the policy of withholding a declaration of war against China and ratified and personally endorsed the decision to remove the constraints of international war on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war. Thus, Chinese soldiers taken in battle were denied the status of prisoners of war upon the same pretext and many of them were massacred, tortured or drafted into Japanese labor camps.
–From Flyboys, Copyright 2003 by James Brady, Page 54Ö
“Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings, responsible to one another and to God.” - Abraham Lincoln, Gen. Orders No. 100, art. 15 (1863).
a rather essential matter, since it reeks of the court’s participation in scapegoating.
I was discussing legal issues too, jerk off. How about discussing this legal issue: we fucking tried and executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding US POWs in WWII. That’s a legal issue.
Discuss.
Is the US waterboarding POW’s or Enemy Combatants?
You need to get your terminology straight, since captured enemy combatants are POWs. I think you mean “unlawful combatants”.
An enemy combatant is a POW you haven’t captured yet.
The President’s authority to detain unlawful combatants only exists during wartime. Since we haven’t declared war on anyone, we can’t very well detain them as such.
That is not what the law says.
Actually “enemy combatants” covers both lawful combatants (POWs) and “unlawful combatants”- basically anyone who isn’t a member of the armed forces of a sovereign state, although it’s a bit more complex than that.
Perhaps you missed the Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed.
You’re right on the first part. On the second part, unlawful combatants can include members of armed forces, if they are concealing their identity, e.g., going round wearing civilian clothes in enemy territory and carrying out clandestine military operations. Having a military ID card in your pocket does not save your skin in those circumstances, I believe.
Well, I for one fully support the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques on Enemy Combatants captured during our Use of Military Force, if it will keep us from torturing POWs during wartime.
…which was authorization under the laws of the United States to take military action, having nothing to do with the formal declaration of war.
Congress declares war via a joint resolution of both houses acknowledging that a state of war exists. Every US military engagement since WWII has, technically, been a police action.
What does it matter? You’ve said flat out that waterboarding is not torture, until courts say so. You’ve been shown several instances where US courts have decalared waterboarding constitutes torture.
Is it any more or less torture depending on who it’s used against?
Yes.
You have to show a specific statute or decision that says waterboarding as applied by the administration is torture and illegal. I have already gone over why the decisions quoted do not apply.
Won’t do it. Cat’s outta the bag. We’re going to torture everyone. It’ll leak over into our domestic police apparatus, too. Just see if it doesn’t.
Of course not, Mr. President. And "forcible intromission per anum" is not necessarily butt-rape. Now please grab your ankles and pray for death.
[sound of elaborate gasoline-powered penetration device, similar to sound of a chainsaw, being fired up]