posted
From an international and political stand point I'm glad the US will be taking the high road in this matter.
From a personal stand point, knowing a soldier in Iraq, and knowing people who lost loved ones on 9/11, I would have to disagree with it. Something in my heart yells that these are suspected criminals, not POWs.
Posts: 3134 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Well, for the record, many people would be less up in arms if they had been just treated like suspected criminals. The big beef has been their wishy-washy, non-classification, which has allowed the administration to pretty much completely ignore Geneva and due process.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Yeah, they would get lots more protections than they had were they treated like suspected criminals.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Stephan: From a personal stand point, knowing a soldier in Iraq, and knowing people who lost loved ones on 9/11, I would have to disagree with it. Something in my heart yells that these are suspected criminals, not POWs.
From a personal standpoint, having a brother and two cousins who have, are and will again serve in Iraq, I can tell you that following guidlines for ethical treatment of prisoners is absolutely the right thing to do.
By the way, we treat criminals humanely in this country too.
Posts: 4753 | Registered: May 2002
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posted
The Geneva Convention always applied. The only difference now is that the Bush Administration admitted it.
Posts: 87 | Registered: Apr 2006
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posted
This isn't as simple an issue as whether to treat prisoners humanely. Its about about what type of tribunal to give them. Military commissions with lower evidence threshholds and appeal rights or full-fledged evidentiary hearings 9court-martials).
A Saudi islamofacsits captured Iraq has zero US Constitutional protections, so any protection must come from international treaties (Geneva Conventions). The Hamdan decision essentially imposes a one-sided treaty with al Queda and other islamofascists.
But all is not lost, as I read Hamdan I think that the Bush Administration can do what it always wanted to but need to get congressional authorization first. Hopefully the democrats won't get in the way of protecting the American people in their zeal to oppose anything Bush proposes, even if they help the cause of islamofascism and endanger the America people in the process.
Posts: 407 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
They do have Constitutional protections, its just that the courts lack jurisdiction to decide on many of those protections while they're being held off US soil.
And you'll be happy to know that many of the Republicans in Congress are joining with the Democrats in being reluctant to just give Bush a waiver on the hearings, partly due to testimony by officers involved in the hearings that they're often farcical .
As for this being a needed protection against 'islamofascism', I recall a recent investigation by the Guardian. You see, one of the prisoners had been before a tribunal several times and avowed his lack of connection, but they said they couldn't find anyone to substantiate his claims, so they kept holding him. The Guardian used sophisticated investigative techniques called 'calling someone in the Iraqi government' and 'opening the phonebook' and tracked down all the people he mentioned (any one of which enough to exonerate him) in about a day. He was shortly released.
Here's a tasty quotation from a military prosecutor involved in the tribunals:
quote:“a halfhearted and disorganized effort by a skeleton group of relatively inexperienced attorneys to prosecute fairly low-level accused in a process that appears to be rigged.”
posted
Can't read the article because I'm not registered with the Sedition Times of NY. I'll I'll take your representation of the facts as accurate for now, but I think I'd rather but my trust in the militaries investigators than on journalists from the Gaurdian or the Times.
I'm not sure what you base your assumption that the Reps are joining with the Dems to block the administrations efforts to fight the islamofacists, but from what I've heard and read over the past few weeks, mostly on NPR interviews, it seems that the democrat leadership is nervous about standing up for the terrorsts during an election year.
Posts: 407 | Registered: Mar 2006
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posted
That's part of why I gave a quotation directly from a military prosecutor.
And they're not trying to block the administration's efforts to fight islamofascists, they like those, its the efforts to use farcical hearings as lip service to due process rights they'd far prefer to circumvent.
As for where I got my notion (it is not an assumption, I suggest you look up the definition of the word) about Republicans joining in, that is also in the article.
quote:Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held the first of three hearings scheduled this week on this issue, and the early results were mixed. Most of the senators, including key Republicans, said they were committed to drafting legislation that did more than merely rubber-stamp the way Mr. Bush decided to set up Guantánamo Bay.
posted
See, Mig's even-handed. She can paint the Dems as simultaneously willing to go to bed with terrorists solely in order to hurt Bush, but afraid to do so in an election year (when presumably it would be most advantageous to "hurt Bush" - barring, of course, the invention of a time machine. ).
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Snow said in the press room that the application of the Geneva convention is 'not a reversal of policy.'
This despite the fact that the Administration was inarguably trying to sell the position that anti-torture conventions are an impediment to the war on terror.
It was always such an inerrantly substanceless position. I'm still continually amazed that some people still buy into it.
posted
Has anyone seen any description about what parts of the Geneva convention will be applied and what the prisoners' status will be (prisoner of war, etc.)?
The SCOTUS decision applied a very narrow portion of the Convention to Hamdan, although it did not say that other portions don't apply. It also didn't say they did apply.
Until I know that, which doesn't seem obvious from the articles, I'm unable to evaluate this announcement.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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