quote: While mistakes and/or bad faith are always possible, I don't think our military actually wants to indefinitely detain people who are not enemy combatants.
This may be the difference. With this president, and this administration, and this military, I think mistakes and bad faith are likely.Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Tom, as far as I know, this president, this administration, and this military have detained two U.S. citizens as enemy combatants: Hamdi and Padilla.
Unless you have evidence that their designations as enemy combatants was the result of either mistake or bad faith, then we only have your say-so that mistakes and bad faith are likely. It looks to me like the administration and the military have been very cautious in applying the enemy combatant label to U.S. citizens.
Posts: 99 | Registered: Nov 2003
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quote:Tom, as far as I know, this president, this administration, and this military have detained two U.S. citizens as enemy combatants: Hamdi and Padilla.
That's one of the scary things about throwing away incarnations of habeus corpus. There often develops a situation where "As far as I know" and the reality of the situation are very different things, as there is no check on this.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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I would just add that the Constitution exists to insure that we don't have to depend on the benevolence of any president, any administration, or any military.
Posts: 11187 | Registered: Sep 2005
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quote:That's one of the scary things about throwing away incarnations of habeus corpus. There often develops a situation where "As far as I know" and the reality of the situation are very different things, as there is no check on this.
quote:Squick said exactly what I hit "reply" to say. So never mind. *grin*
Give me a break. My caveat was in case there were some U.S. citizen being held as an enemy combatant about whom I had not heard because he had not become a cause celebre.
But still, your response has got to be one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard.
If this president, this administration, and this military were in fact secretly holding U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, habeas corpus would do them no good -- because if no one outside their captors knows they're being held, no one could take any legal action on their behalf. Thus the "throwing away" of habeas corpus rights would not affect them.
quote:I would just add that the Constitution exists to insure that we don't have to depend on the benevolence of any president, any administration, or any military.
Kmbboots, on the other hand, makes a very good point -- because it is generally applicable, not just a display of animus toward the Bush administration.
Even if, contrary to TomDavidson's unsubstantiated assertions, the Bush administration has been very careful in its detention of U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, it's quite possible that future administrations will not be. Therefore, developing procedures that will adequately protect U.S. citizens from detention due to mistakes and bad faith is a good idea. (It's probably a good idea to develop adequate procedures for non-citizens as well.)
Posts: 99 | Registered: Nov 2003
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I'm not sure why her point -- which is the SAME as my point -- is more accurate because it's less specific. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:If this president, this administration, and this military were in fact secretly holding U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, habeas corpus would do them no good -- because if no one outside their captors knows they're being held, no one could take any legal action on their behalf. Thus the "throwing away" of habeas corpus rights would not affect them.
You're putting the cart before the horse there. The only way that people could (barring illegal actions by our government) get into that situation is if we threw away the instances of habeus corpus (as a concept, not as a specific legal thing) that prevent the government from doing this.
When we're debating whether the goverment can disappear people based only on their say so, saying that having rules saying that the government has to show proof that someone has committed a crime before imprisioning them won't help them after they've been disappeared is kind of missing the point.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:When we're debating whether the goverment can disappear people based only on their say so
Of course, that's not what's being debated now. The Padilla decision specifically does NOT say that the goverment can disappear people based only on their say so. And no court case will protect against such a thing happening.
quote:I would just add that the Constitution exists to insure that we don't have to depend on the benevolence of any president, any administration, or any military.
quote:If this president, this administration, and this military were in fact secretly holding U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, habeas corpus would do them no good -- because if no one outside their captors knows they're being held, no one could take any legal action on their behalf. Thus the "throwing away" of habeas corpus rights would not affect them.
quote:I'm not sure why her point -- which is the SAME as my point -- is more accurate because it's less specific.
Because you have absolutely no evidence whatsover to back up your claim that the current adminsitration is likely to make mistakes or use bad faith in detaining U.S. citizens as enemy combatants. There have been two instances so far, and neither of them seems to be a case of mistake or bad faith.
For example, consider the following two statements: 1. TomDavidson's posts on Hatrack are likely to be factually incorrect. 2. It's a good idea not to believe that everything you read on Hatrack is factually correct.
#2 is certainly true.
#1 is more specific than #2, but that doesn't make it more accurate. Since you've made over 20,000 posts in these forums and I haven't read more than a tiny fraction of them, I haven't got much evidence as to the likelihood of factual incorrectness in your posts. You may, in fact, be substantially less prone to factual incorrectness than the average Hatrack forum poster.
So, as you can see, specificity does not necessarily correlate with accuracy.
I asked you for evidence that the Bush administration was mistaken or showing bad faith in its designation of citizens as enemy combatants, and all you and Mr. Squicky could come up with was an irrelevancy regarding my caveat as to the number of detainees I was aware of.
Mr. Squicky,
quote:You're putting the cart before the horse there. The only way that people could (barring illegal actions by our government) get into that situation is if we threw away the instances of habeus corpus (as a concept, not as a specific legal thing) that prevent the government from doing this. [Emphasis added by EJS.]
Since secret detentions of U.S. citizens as enemy combatants would, in fact, be illegal under current law, my point stands. If the current administration is detaining citizens beyond the ones that public knows about, habeas corpus isn't doing them a lot of good, and questions about current habeas corpus jurisprudence are among the least of their problems.
And, if your only point was about future hypothetical loss of habeas corpus rights that would allow secret detentions, then my caveat of "as far as I know" with regard to the current situation is irrelevant.
Posts: 99 | Registered: Nov 2003
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Squicky, why are you quoting something that explains in perfect detail why secret detentions are not relevant to this discussion?
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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So never mind. *grin*
