Thanks for making my point. Didn't hear of it, did you? Why?
As for the rest, I'd like to see how people would be "horror stricken" at Auschwitz and still have it up and running. The military is apparently deporting the prisoners to secret foreign locations while we await the leisure of the American public.
SAM:
Actually, I have followed all of the court cases regarding the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners. Some of the strongest opposition to the position of the administration has come from US lawyers, standing up for due process rights.
I note that you are unable to quote the part of whatever decision you were supposedly referring to.
What action by the American people (as opposed to the current executive government) would you like to see to "fix" the problem?
Seized in Pakistan in April 2002, Binyam was rendered to Morocco three months later, where he was tortured on behalf of the U.S. for 18 months, in sessions that regularly included having his genitals cut with a razor, and was then held for nine months in Afghanistan, first at the "Dark Prison," a secret prison run by the CIA, where he was also tortured, and then at Bagram airbase. He has been held at Guantánamo since September 2004.
When justice finally came for Binyam, it was not at Guantánamo, but in London's High Court, where, last Thursday, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones delivered a stinging rebuke to both the British and the American governments: to the British for the complicity of the UK intelligence services in the U.S. administration's post-9/11 policies of "extraordinary rendition" and torture, and to the Americans for the lawless conduct of the trials by military commission that were established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to deal with "terror suspects" like Binyam (even though the judges professed in their ruling that they "did not consider it necessary to form any view about the overall fairness of the military commissions procedure").
The road to the High Court opened up in May this year, when Binyam's lawyers at the legal action charity Reprieve, who represent over 30 Guantánamo prisoners, teamed up with solicitors at Leigh Day & Co. to sue the British government, seeking the release of information relating to British knowledge of Binyam's rendition and torture, in preparation for his impending trial at Guantánamo.
In the event, this was prescient, as charges were leveled against Binyam on May 28, in connection with the spectral "dirty bomb" plot that was dropped years ago against U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. It was, therefore, imperative that potentially exculpatory evidence – which the British possessed, and which they had also handed over to the Americans – was made available to his lawyers so that they could begin preparing a defense, and, preferably, discover evidence of torture, which would back up Binyam's claims that the charges against him were based solely on confessions obtained through torture, and would, therefore, make the U.S. administration call off his forthcoming trial.
“torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.”
The court ruled that the officials could not be sued because they were merely carrying out their official duties.
"the detainees captured in Afghanistan aren't recognized as 'persons' under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act because they were aliens held outside the United States."
We are in the awkward position of our Executive Branch being out of control. Since the Rooseveltian Era began in 1933, we have watched our Supreme Court adopt a policy of activism rather than one of safeguarding the Constitution. As a result, whenever the President and the Supreme Court majority are of the same political persuasion, there are no "checks and balances" by the Judicial Branch on presidential excess. Congress is usually closely balanced between the two parties (right now there is exactly a one-vote majority in the Senate) so the Legislative Branch does not step in to do its own job. So we have the unfortunate situation of a "democracy" in which a vast majority of the people are opposed to the president's policies, but we can't change the government quickly enough to do anything about it.Stop lying? About what? I don't care what order you do it in. Get out of other countries or stop the torture. But I think logistically its like asking, should we keep Auschwitz on the burner while we wait till Germany is defeated? I think I'd rather see the torture camps closed asap, thank you very much. You're not getting out of either country for another couple of years yet if at all for another decade or two, I'm not for the torture camps to continue till you get around to them eventually. Just stop the torture. Right now.
Well okay, I'll accept that as an honorable disagreement. Personally I think they rank about equally, since destruction of infrastructure tortures a lot more people than prison camps, and contributes indirectly to their deaths by the loss of health and safety services, degradation of sanitation, shelter and nutrition, and increase in lawlessness.FR i find it very sad that you would rank destruction of infrastructure as a greater crime than torture.
As a libertarian I can't argue with that. Causing direct harm to another human being is the worst crime. Arson and destruction of property cause only indirect harm, which under a libertarian government would be handled by tort and easement law in the civil courts. Still, when it's done systematically, by a government, it can have consequences that are just as bad.as far as i know once the new crime of torture is introduced it will carry a penelty of life just as murder does. Arson and other distruction of property carries MUCH lower sentances.
That's my point. It does lead to death. Civilians die every day in Iraq due to roving armed bands of religious zealots, breakdown of sanitation and unavailability of medical care. This is our fault. The infrastructure worked very well under Saddam, except of course for the plight of the Kurds.so your right murder may well be the top of the list of evils but torture comes 2 not destruction of infrastructure is a much lower crime unless it leads to death
It's not our "leisure." It's a problem with the way our political system works. It's taken more than two hundred years for it to get this bad because it's a problem that the Founders could not possibly have foreseen.The military is apparently deporting the prisoners to secret foreign locations while we await the leisure of the American public.
Sam is a Muslim and Muslims believe that the afterlife is more important than the maintenance of civilization in this trivial temporal world, and that every dead baby will be greeted with lollipops and puppdogs by Allah. (Whoops, that particular imaginary god thinks puppydogs are too "unclean" to play with, what a fucking horrible heaven that must be!) I'm sure she would like to see us rise up in arms and overthrow our government. You can easily glean this from her writing, because she consistently finds the humiliation of prisoners more offensive than simply killing people. That is classic Islam. They would rather be shot at than insulted. Drawing a disrespectful cartoon of Mohammed is a bigger crime than destroying an entire country.What action by the American people (as opposed to the current executive government) would you like to see to "fix" the problem?
Once again, I point out the interesting fact that you complain much more often and much more loudly about a relatively small number of your people being tortured, than about a relatively large number of them being killed. There's something in your culture that finds the insult and humiliation of torture far more offensive than "mere" death. More offensive by two or three orders of magnitude.What do you think? Are people kidnapped and tortured by Americans, persons? Should they have the right to redress? Whom should they apply to for redressal?
Once again, I point out the interesting fact that you complain much more often and much more loudly about a relatively small number of your people being tortured, than about a relatively large number of them being killed. There's something in your culture that finds the insult and humiliation of torture far more offensive than "mere" death. More offensive by two or three orders of magnitude.
Islam will never be compatible with civilization until it gets with the program and develops more respect for human life. ALL human life.
I am frankly flummoxed..
No, Q, this isn't about you. This is about Sam being a baby. She tests the limits and some of us continue to forgive her so she gets away with it. Then she pushes harder. She seems to be determined to see how far she can push before everyone starts to slap her down. I think she's about a day and a half from that limit, and only because tomorrow is a holiday.
Look, I don't doubt some abuses are going on in prisons. It's just the nature of prisons. You try to keep them clean and legit, but some bad apples are always going to louse things up. Not to mention that former prisoners are going to lie about their incarceration. Just the nature of the beast.
I don't support torture, but I also do not support rulling it completely out as a method of interrogation. Why? Becuase having the prisoner fear what might happen but never does is far more effective if they know it could. In other words don't outlaw it, just refrain from using it.
Sorry, I realized that line was inappropriate and deleted it as quickly as the server would work. You must have nothing better to do today than argue with people who take the Serenity Prayer seriously, ready to pounce on every post. ("Goddess grant me the strength to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can't change, and the wisdom to know the difference.") I apologize for the insult, it was sincere but off topic in this thread. Here, as always, I diss ALL of the stupid, worthless, uncivilized Abrahamic religions. The current situation in the Middle East is just the latest in an endless series of crises caused by the friction among them. Sure there are other issues, but if they weren't Abrahamists they wouldn't have that irrational conviction of "God is with us against the infidels" that gets in the way of compromise.What do I understand by the fact that you are more interested in dissing my religion. . . .
It is a widespread fallacy to believe that bereaved people are rational and should be allowed to make policy. Isn't that how most wars start? But to answer your question, of course I think it's wrong to have to wait for the war to end before we can close down the prisons. But reread the Serenity Prayer. It is simply something we're going to have to do. The alternative is to have another Revolution or another Civil War, and there aren't many Americans who think that would be better.. . . .than in the fact that your justice system hs decided torture should be expected and detainees are not persons who can expect redress? Tell me if your wife was being held in an unknown secret location being tortured for several years, if you had no contact with her for the duration of those years, what would your expectations be? Wait for the war to end? Get her out asap? If she did get out, would you want redress? Or not?
How? You display your ignorance of America at every turn. Let's say you're not a Muslim, you're a U.S. citizen and you're loaded with charisma, so Americans will listen to you. You've got tens of millions of us who agree with you. Just exactly how will you and your followers shut down these prisons any faster than the 18-month timetable that Iraq has given us to get the hell out of their country, much less the four months until Bush leaves office and his presumptive successor will start doing what we want?I am frankly flummoxed by the attitudes I see here. To minimise the effects and consequences of torture, which is something that can be stopped immediately. . . .
It's called "working within the Constitution." We need a new generation of leaders who will stop using that venerable document for toilet paper. Truman started the convention of going to war (Korea) without the pesky Constitutional formality of waiting for Congress to declare one, and neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has slapped down any of his successors for doing the same thing (Vietnam, Grenada, Afghanistan, Iraq). As I said, this is a much bigger and scarier problem than a few hundred members of the religion that calls us The Great Satan being tortured, the majority of whom were captured while taking up arms against America and could have been simply killed off without raising much of a protest. This sets the American government up to be unaccountable to anyone. All these people need is the engaging personality and rhetorical skills to get elected, and then they can start bombing anybody who pisses them off without having to even apologize, much less go on trial. As a citizen of both America and the world I find this far more disturbing than Guantanamo.. . . .and harp on unknown fantasies of the future when Americans will stop invading defenceless countries seems like chronic denial to me.
Islam has the same track record as Christianity: destroy an entire civilization because the people are only "infidels" and don't have any rights. You barely have to go back a hundred years to find the atrocities of Islamists. Abraham, if he was a real person, was one of the greatest villains in history.Or that you consider Islam to be incompatible with civilisation when its your country with the moronic invasions, occupations, torture camps and court rulings.
Well I can't argue with that. I just hope you're wrong. There's no question that McCain would make this all worse. I think it was a mistake for the Democrats to be so over-confident that they picked this election to break the race (or gender) barrier. But I understand people who say, "If not now, when?"Not to mention, unlike you, I have no confidence that: 1. Obama will win; 2. That if Obama wins, it will make any difference.
Fraggle said:Just exactly how will you and your followers shut down these prisons any faster than the 18-month timetable that Iraq has given us to get the hell out of their country, much less the four months until Bush leaves office and his presumptive successor will start doing what we want?
Sorry, I realized that line was inappropriate and deleted it as quickly as the server would work. You must have nothing better to do today than argue with people who take the Serenity Prayer seriously, ready to pounce on every post.
Sam is a Muslim and Muslims believe that the afterlife is more important than the maintenance of civilization in this trivial temporal world, and that every dead baby will be greeted with lollipops and puppdogs by Allah. (Whoops, that particular imaginary god thinks puppydogs are too "unclean" to play with, what a fucking horrible heaven that must be!) I'm sure she would like to see us rise up in arms and overthrow our government. You can easily glean this from her writing, because she consistently finds the humiliation of prisoners more offensive than simply killing people. That is classic Islam. They would rather be shot at than insulted. Drawing a disrespectful cartoon of Mohammed is a bigger crime than destroying an entire country.
We aren't talking about bad apples, we're talking about deliberately established policy and infrastructure. Abu Ghreaib was deliberately set up to be not clean and not legit. This is not "in the nature of" American federal prisons, yet, and sane people will not allow it to spread any further than it has.scott said:Look, I don't doubt some abuses are going on in prisons. It's just the nature of prisons. You try to keep them clean and legit, but some bad apples are always going to louse things up
The captives at Gitmo, Abu, etc, were mostly in violation of nothing. They had a perfect right to be where they were, doing what they were doing. Their captors and torturers are in violation of Geneva - we know that because the President found it necessary to get a specific pseudo-legal exemption from Geneva for their operations.scott said:These prisoners are not violaters of US law, but of Geneva conventions.
Again: not really. Scott's delusion about "bad apples", for example, is based on the media coverage, so you can see that most of these things that SAM is talking about, and I am talking about, and so forth, have not been presented factually and accurately in the major media to a US audience. For example:james said:How did you hear about these things? They are all over the media.
Now how many Americans have been presented with Gitmo and Abu and Bagram as consequences of policy - deliberate creations of people who set out to create American torture prisons and succeeded ? Are both candidates really and equivalently aware of that, think you ?james said:What is needed (and both candidates are well aware of this) is a change in policy and in laws.
So? As Sam has noted, it's been years now. They are still going, and their perpetrators remain free and unpunished.james said:Actually, I have followed all of the court cases regarding the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners. Some of the strongest opposition to the position of the administration has come from US lawyers, standing up for due process rights.
In the first place, that characterization of "the majority" is false. In the second, the establishment of torture centers and their public acknowledgment is indeed scarier than the prosecution of imperial executive war, not because it's worse but because its a further long step down that bad road. It's a worse sign.fraggle said:As I said, this is a much bigger and scarier problem than a few hundred members of the religion that calls us The Great Satan being tortured, the majority of whom were captured while taking up arms against America and could have been simply killed off without raising much of a protest.
Also, what does it say about the American public that the torture and prisons are not an issue that is ever discussed?