Desdemona

US Troops can not and should not do the same but, that double standard gives us a little wiggle room with President Bush's signing of the Military Commissions Act.

MAC will be debated over and over over again with regard to Gitmo and habeas corpus. I expect the ACLU will never leave it alone. To the best of my knowledge it has yet to be over turned and only David Hicks who pleaded guilty was released to Australia for detention there.

And in recent news brought to you from Appeals Court Rules That Gitmo Detainees Are Not "Persons" (And That Torture Is To Be Expected)

by Mary Shaw Page 1 of 1 page(s)
OpEdNews.Com Progressive, Tough Liberal News and Opinion Home Page

Just when I thought I couldn't be more disgusted with the torture being done in our name and with our tax dollars, another sickening news report comes along:

According to McClatchy Newspapers, a federal appeals court in D.C. "threw out a suit by four British Muslims who allege that they were tortured and subjected to religious abuse in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a ruling that exonerated 11 present and former senior Pentagon officials."

Why? Because "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."

Furthermore, the court rejected other claims "on the grounds that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft had certified that the military officials were acting within the scope of their jobs when they authorized the tactics, and that such tactics were 'foreseeable.'"

So, according to the court, the Gitmo detainees are not persons, and the torture should have been foreseeable (in other words, torture is to be expected). In fact, the court said that "the interrogation tactics, which Rumsfeld first authorized in 2002, were 'incidental' to the duties of those who'd been sued." Ouch.

Whether or not the court sees the detainees as persons, they are human beings. As such, they have human rights, and those human rights were violated.

I hope the Supreme Court will set things straight. But I shall not hold my breath.

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Mary Shaw Online - www.maryshawonline.com - Philadelphia-based writer and activist
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.

PS- my momma taught me that if I don't have anything nice to say, don't say it, so I will not be replying to this author,,,, only to the nice WAB'ers

Blademaster

I am not excusing them and I do want them severely punished. But the point is that what we are doing, the waterboarding thing, is really torture, fitting every element of the definition. I think we should allow some forms of torture in certain cases but we should have a law on it so we can have some guidelines to follow. We should have a torture warrant and some kind of system where we can legally use torture to extract information. Of course it would receive the utmost scrutiny.

Expat Canuck

They would cut my head off with a rusty butter knife or try and cut my still beating heart out with a spoon while filiming it so they could post it on the internet. Personally if it got that bad I'd save a bullet or make it so they have to kill me. However, I've not been in that situation but I'd like to think I have the balls to save that bullet but I'm kind of one of those stubborn optomists and would see if I could get away.

If I was rescued no my view would not change, I would rather them dead just as I would rather them dead now. Less paper work anyway.

Edit//

forgot the first part. If they did inded do that terrorist stuff like killing innocents are they not war criminals? Send them to Den Hague put them in a war crimes trial and hang the bastards.

astralis

col yu,

my problem with guantanamo is not so much the moral implications of what it means to US (the west has done far worse), but with the political impact of what it means to those fence-sitters. if we're ever going to win the GWOT, it is by persuading the fence-sitters to join our side.

put it this way, take the example of abu ghraib. what we did wasn't a scratch on what AQI does daily, it seems. however, what was the political impact? Coalition Provisional Authority polls taken before abu ghraib showed coalition support at some 65%. taken after abu ghraib, 9%. this is an impact strategic in nature, and not good for us.

in the end guantanamo allows us to win the tactical battles. the terrorists locked up in there are nasty and deserve far more than waterboarding, certainly. however, if the info we squeeze out of the terrorists allow us to catch ten more, while one hundred thousand (or whatever number) of muslims become incensed at our actions, i fail to see how we strategically win.

""More than anything else it's been the image -- how Gitmo has become around the world, in terms of representing the United States."- adm mike mullen

__________________
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Desdemona

A torture warrant? The Committee in my head is on the fence on this one........

A warrant for torture might be hypocritical. To say that torture is against the law and then to creating a means whereby it becomes legal thru a warrant only presents some accountability, not clarification. With accountability comes a whole host of other issues like freedom of information and freedom of the press. Would CNN and all the networks film and document the torture sessions? Doubtful, but certainly there would be some sort of classified record in the history files. The CIA has been know to erase things before and now The U.S. Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA videotapes of the interrogations of terrorist suspects. Where is the ACLU and Amnesty International going to stand? On the side of protecting the identities of the prosecutors, defending the rights of the terrorists, standing for freedom of information, saving innocents from terrorist acts at any cost....

Hear that noise? It is the sound of more of our tax dollars being sucked out of our wallets as yet another investigation goes on and on. What did the 911Commission, The Warren Commission or any other Commission really reveal to the public? Maybe in our naivety, commissions prove that there is no accountability. Did we kill Kennedy and allow the events of 911 to happen?

I wonder, would the evidence gathered from a court issued warrant for torture then be admissible to the court? Remember that in the USA we have a law against "self-incrimination".

I doubt that not having a torture warrant would end torture. We hear of many cases in where there was no warrant issued for a search and seizure and yet search and seizures happen without warrants. I would expect that whomever issued a warrant for torture order would have to be pretty high in the food chain. The Supreme Court, DOD, CIA, The President?

Maybe a torture warrant would allow us to send detainees to Israel or someplace else to extract information thus keeping the blood off of our own hands.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, who's props include being a member of OJ Simpson legal team also supports the idea of a torture warrant in one of his books "Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age''.

The Case for Torture Warrants

CNN.com - Dershowitz: Torture could be justified - Mar. 3, 2003

Officer of Engineers

There comes a point where we have to say, screw our image. We're at war. How many Allied Citizens before WWII thought they could burn whole cities to the ground without blinking?

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Chimo

astralis

col yu,

sure, i understand that. but in the case of guantanamo 1. must we do it so publicly? 2. are the tactical gains worth the strategic loss? if the answer to 1 and 2. are yes, then guantanamo is worth it.

unlike WWII, we don't plan to beat our enemy into servile submission by force of arms alone. image is far more important now.

Expat Canuck

Equally controversial will be the revelation in the notebooks that Churchill wanted the Royal Air Force to obliterate German villages in retaliation for the Nazis' massacre of civilians in Lidice, a Czech village. Churchill abandoned his plan only in the face of strong opposition from cabinet colleagues.

It may be that he would have lived to regret the raids should they have taken place. Within weeks of authorising the bombing of Dresden in 1945, he began to question the wisdom of the policy. He later said the deaths of up to 30,000 German civilians raised a "query against the conduct of Allied bombers".


Revealed: warrior Churchill's ruthless mind - World - theage.com.au

Someone just posted this in another unrelated thread and I thought it was a bit interesting.

Dreadnought

Sir,
One of the best points made here among 11 pages of arguments and emotions.
Cheers!

__________________
Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.