Ok, if you’re now reversing yourself and feel that it’s perfectly kosher for the US government to throw thousands of American civilians in jail for years without any trial, why, after I mentioned the throwing of accused confederates in jail did you proclaim
Why in that post did you find the actions to be “horrendous” and believe they should never repeated yet now you say they’re fine?
So then you do think it was outrageous that the US executed numerous and German and Japanese people they alleged were “war criminals” without giving them civilian trials?
The way you phrase it, you make the death sentences sound like summary executions. They were not. The Nuremberg Tribunal, in particular, gave the German defendants the benefit of a large, multinational, public trial. It wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was more or less fair. The defendants had legal representation, and they had the benefit of an actual trial.
Contrast that with Guantanamo Bay, a veritable concentration camp in which individuals have been illegally detained for nearly a decade, in some cases. They have not been tried, convicted, or given the chance to tell their stories. They have not received legal representation. Many of them have been tortured; some have died of “natural causes.” At this point, the imperfect Nuremberg system appears to be several orders of magnitude better than the brutality that has now been embraced by US politicians and their military lackeys. Which is perhaps one more good reason to hate the troops.
You’re comparing the trials of people after detention to people still in detention (and not yet tried). That’s not apples to apples.
The detainees who were in Gitmo and were tried in court, I’d say their trials, while not perfect by any means, were more or less fair.
You would be correct if any sort of judicial proceeding was actually in sight for the detainees. Sadly, I’m not seeing anything but an illegal indefinite interment here. When you’ve been imprisoned for 10 years, it’s somewhat difficult to view that as a pre-trial detention. No, at that point, it’s an extrajudicial punishment – essentially an illegal life sentence without trial. As a civilized human being, I cannot support such a barbaric policy. Even the Nuremberg war criminals were treated far better and more humanely than this.
I’d have thought you’d celebrate such a thing. You favor Stalinesque totalitarian systems, where summary executions and mass murders are commonplace and make Gitmo look like a summercamp. Or is it only ok when Stalin does it?
All but 46, out of the 140ish detainees left (I’m guessing) are being released or tried. The 46 are being detained sans trial until the end of hostilities. We can definitely debate when “end of hostilities” will occur in this type of “war”. I think it’s an outdated concept imposed on an updated reality.
But you’re still confusing the principle of detainment. It’s not punishment, it’s not pre-trial detention - that’s why most (several hundreds) were released without a trial. They were detained combatants - released when no longer a threat (or because they never were) or held until the end of hostilities so they can’t return to the fight. The ones who happened to commit war crimes will probably be tried at some point (and must be tried once hostilities cease. e.g. Nuremberg). Whether they are tried now, and found not guilty of a war crime, would have no bearing on the US’s ability to continue detaining them as combatants until the end of hostilities. It is very probable, to be detained in a war, and commit no crime.
For comparison, the North Vietnamese held an American POW for 9 years. He was caught near the beginning of the war, held until the end. No trial. Not held because he did anything wrong other than fight. Of course, I believe he went batshit crazy later in life as a direct result of the his cozy detainment.
I’ve mentioned this before, but the Thais took it for granted that the Vietnam War halted the spread of communism. You can argue yes it did/no it didn’t, but at the time the locals truly believed this, and I think there is at least some grain of truth. (The younger generation doesn’t really know about the Vietnam War). Imagine you are a Thai in 1975, and you see Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos all falling. It really felt to many Thais that their country was next. The Vietnamese Communist Party did have connections in Thailand – Ho Chi Minh himself spent a couple of years in northeastern Thailand rallying the faithful around 1930 or so; the house he lived in is a monument now, and some trees he planted have grown rather tall – and even into the 1980s there were areas of the Northeast that were communist-controlled and you ventured into them at risk of your life (I personally remember this).
The local thinking goes that the Vietnam War kept the communists in the region busy long enough for Thailand to improve the infrastructure in the Northeast, traditionally the poorest area of Thailand. Roads were built, electricity supplied, stuff like that. Again, large swathes were under communist rebels into the 1980s, but the local thinking was that their momentum was lost, and they credited the US involvement in the region. Also again, whether this was true is debatable, but it was a widespread belief at the time.
You seem to be misinformed as to what’s going on in Gitmo and who’s being held there.
People were grabbed of the street in some cases, or arrested through informants. Once there, people were tortured to get confessions. Both of this did not happen at the Nuremburg (Nürnberg) Trials.
And any confession that came about under torture is not admissible in a fair court system. So even if some of the people in Gitmo were eventually put in front of a court, it was not a fair trial anymore at that point.
Be that as it may, there are ways to go between malcontents stirring up trouble in the remote marches of the realm, and toppling the country. Ask the FARC ;).
I don’t think the establishment of a Communist state is possible without either
a) a popular insurrection to be betrayed later (see China, Russia, Cuba, Vietnam…). Can’t have a decent dictatorship of the proletariat if the proletariat’s not on board 
or
b) military occupation by a foreign, communist power (see: the Balkans).
By your own account, the Thais were not on board with a), and as for b) I don’t think the Vietnamese army was ever strong enough to out and out seize Thailand, US involvement or not.
So really, the worst case scenario would have been… well, the FARC or the IRA: an ongoing, more or less impossible to stop guerilla war that nevertheless doesn’t achieve much of anything and lasts until one side grows bored of fighting a losing war. Which would have been bad, of course, but a communist Thailand ? Not so much.
Maybe, maybe not. Again, the Thais themselves largely credited, and thanked, the US for their involvement in Vietnam. They really did believe they were the next domino. And the Thais up in the Northeast were very much onboard for an insurrection, along with the big communist insurgency in the South that was occurring at the same time.
I remember the general amnesty in 1988 or 1989 that the remaining fighters took advantage of. Nowadays they get trotted out for the occasional magazine interview about what the old days were like.
BTW: The Thais contributed troops to the Vietnam War. I was not here that far back, but a British friend was. He said Beatles songs were universally played by just about any house band worth their salt, and whenever they did “A Day in the Life,” they inveritably changed the lyrics “The English Army had just won the war” to “The Thai Army had just won the war,” to be met by roaring applause.
I acknowledged people were held there that were never a threat. I assume those people can no longer be held (and are released or awaiting a home). If you can point to one of the 46 being held, with no intention of being released, that is not a threat and never was, I’m all ears.
For the ones that will be tried for crimes, I’m aware of tortured confessions. They won’t be tried and convicted based on confessions that resulted from torture. We can look to the Military Commission rules regarding tortured confessions. MCA 2009:
So NOW they will follow the the military rules. They have rules against torture too. Rendition is also illegal. But now we can trust them to do the right thing.
So, you expect us to prove to you that the illegally-detained are innocent of any and all crimes before you will acknowledge the illegality of their detainment? Er… that seems a bit backward to me. Call me old-school, but I tend to view people as innocent until proven guilty by a fair and just court of law. Do you disagree? How do you even expect individuals with no constitutional rights, no legal representation, no access to evidence against them, no right to cross-examine witnesses against them, and no knowledge of the charges against them to affirmatively prove their innocence?
Maybe I’m not being clear. I’ll spot you their innocence. No need to prove it. It’s perfectly acceptable to detain someone “innocent.” So it doesn’t matter whether you or I prove that or not. In a perfect world, the innocent won’t be charged with crimes, and if they are, they will be found not guilty. That has NOTHING in the world to due with our right to detain them during a war.
There are people that can be detained in a war, combatants. Like the American POW who was held for 9 years in Vietnam. He’s innocent, he committed no crimes. His detention for 9 years was lawful, however.
Some combatants commit crimes during the war. Like the Germans tried in Nuremberg. Whether the court that tried them was fair, is separate from whether they could be detained until the war was over.
They all can be held until the war is over - the innocent and war criminals alike. Whether they are innocent of crimes committed during a war is irrelevant to our power to detain them. This doesn’t mean I don’t have a ton of concerns. I do. But when you say, “the illegally-detained are innocent of any and all crimes before you will acknowledge the illegality of their detainment” conflates two separate issues. We can discuss whether that person is the enemy and subject to our detention power (e.g. some, as already suggested, were brought to Gitmo on poor intelligence and were not the “enemy” - thus we could not lawfully detain them). Others, lawfully detained, are accused of committing crimes prior to their detention (using a commercial jet to intentionally target civilians), and will face trial for those crimes. And finally others, who are lawfully detained, but committed no crimes (or not charged), will be held until the end of the war.
So, we can discuss whether the trial they will face is fair or not. We can also discuss whether the original military commissions (circa 2002 Bush) were fair (NO), and whether the twice revamped military commissions (circa 2009) they will face now are fair (much more so). We can discuss how it’s possible to tell when hostilities have ended. Finally, we can discuss whether America should even have the power to preventively detain non-traditional combatants (terrorists) in the first place. But it’s difficult when it’s all lumped together because it’s two separate issues.
Just to clarify, the issue at Guantanamo is that some large portion of the detainees (potentially a majority of them) were never combatants. There is no legal right to detain non-combatants without trail.
Of course, none of this has the slightest thing to do with your typical American grunts.
Again, I don’t understand why you are bothered by any of this fair and just court of law, constitutional rights, legal representation, access to evidence, right to cross examine and knowledge of charges against them nonsense. You hold up North Korea, Communist China and the former Soviet Union as shining examples of how governments should work, and proudly proclaim that one party states are ideal and insist that you are somehow a citizen of the USSR despite the going out of business sign they put up in 1991. Did any of those thousands of Polish officers and intelligentsia shot in the back of the head and dumped into mass graves at Katyn have access to council? A trial, much less a fair and just one? Were they even charged with anything before summary execution? Did the Moscow Trials when Stalin purged his own officer corps of tens of thousands of souls meet any criterion of trial that you now present yourself as being ‘old school’ and in favor of?
Well, a number of those trials resulted in the defendant being sent to die in a Gulag, which you insist were propaganda inventions of that lying, imperialist, counter-revolutionary traitor Solzhenitsyn so are these trials also lies spread by counter-revolutionary traitors?
CoolHandCox, you seem to be mixing together a lot of different concepts into your argument.
First of all, the US government has been adamant that the Guantanamo detainees are not POWs and do not receive any Geneva Conventions protection: http://www.cfr.org/international-law/enemy-combatants/p5312
Secondly, if the detainees are POWs (and I argue that they are, since a nation cannot unilaterally declare the Geneva Conventions inapplicable), then they may not under any circumstances be tried for killing or attempting to kill US soldiers. I cannot emphasize this enough: killing the enemy in wartime is perfectly permissible, and may not be criminalized. Hence, any trials of these individuals, civilian or otherwise, are a violation of international law.
Finally, I would argue that there is clearly a good-faith requirement implicit in the Geneva Conventions. Yes, POWs can be detained, and can be detained for a long time, but this detention may not be a pretext for illegal life imprisonment. At some point, the detainees must be free to return home. When do you suppose this will happen? The Afghan insurgency will not cease until you leave Afghanistan, and your government has made it clear that it intends to keep a permanent military presence in the country. Does this mean that the POWs will not be able to return home within their lifetimes? To me, that seems like cynical spitting into the face of the Geneva Conventions, and a perfect example of US barbarism and depravity.
Gotcha. I admittedly haven’t gone through the whole thread.
Gitmo maxed at 775 detainees. There are 171 today, and 48 (which I called 46 previously) of those 171 will not be tried or released. So a vast majority of the detainees have been released (not commenting on whether they should have been there in the first place).
We would just need to determine whether those 48 being detained without trial are lawful combatants.
I only mixed types of combatants to show a country has a power to detain combatants without trial. And that’s only one concept, not a lot.
For the sake of keeping things simple, let’s call them POW’s (which they all argued they wanted to be - which if so, meant they admit they were captured in a “war” and are combatants subject to the laws of war). That means they have combatant immunity, which means they cannot be charged with the crime of lawfully killing another enemy soldier. I’ll grant you that, too. However, there are still lawful and unlawful ways combatants can kill. You don’t get free range to intentionally kill anyone. So, flying a plane with the goal of killing civilians = illegal = war crime…even if the person is detained as a Geneva POW. So, you’d have to go on a case by case basis to see what they person is charged with, and whether they are solely charged with a lawful killing. I’m betting Obama does not do that.
To your second point, I agree. Except I wouldn’t limit our right to detain solely on the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan. There’s the global war on terrorists that’s more troubling and also justification to detain.
I see two ways it might be handled, the good and the bad:
(1) The Good - the recent case of Ahmed Warsame(just linked first article I saw); he was lawfully detained under IHL/laws of war for two months and interrogated, then handed over to the FBI and read Miranda who built a criminal case against him. He will be tried in NY Federal Court.
(2) The Bad - don’t bother with detaining, just kill them (e.g. Attack of the Drones).