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Supreme Court restores habeas to Gitmo, giving yet another setback to Bush (pg. 7)
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| quote: | Originally posted by Clovis
This is about not being able to rubber stamp pretty much anyone as an "Al Qaeda terrorist" with no type of process to ensure we're even attempting to detain and prosecute the right people. |
that's exactly right. im still somewhat bemused that this particular point is being ignored by those that oppose the decision.
additionally, considering that the US has had to evolve their methods of warfare alongside the changing nature of war (from a state v state to an actor v actor dynamic) then perhaps the judiciary is just a little bit ahead of congress with regards to how to adequately handle captured "enemy" "soldiers" in the 21st century?
In other words, just because the germans didn't have similar access to the US legal system does not mean that today's conflicts are as simple to determine, therefore "special" or new treatment for those caught in such wars is merely a reflection of the changing nature of war, at least by the advanced countries. |
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| Zild |
| Yes because I'm so ing afraid that a terrorist is going to blow me up in bum, Texas. Give me a ing break what the hell are we so afraid of that is worth suspending a right that has been demanded by the public for quite some time now. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
i cant be bothered going through this yet again, but that article does absolutely nothing to refute lesbiankalashnikov's. |
Took the words right out of my mouth. It was scarcely even on the same topic.
There are two things that absolutely appall me about this discussion:
1. That there is so little faith in the American judicial system that the argument is seriously being used that the granting of a fair trial would result in actual perpetrators of terrorism walking free. Do you also believe that criminals here in the states routinely walk after committing murder? Should we perhaps suspend habeas corpus here as well? After all, Justice Scalia was perfectly clear that where there exists real fear that a guilty man walks free, our own security and basic freedom are at risk. Where would you like this argument to end?
2. Are the core American principles only so strong that they can be applied within our own territorial borders? If we truly believe in the universality of our values, what is preventing their universal application? Convenience? Laziness? A lack of respect for those very values (rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, liberty, etc.) themselves? Why is it that every enemy combatant taken into custody is immediately assumed guilty of the most heinous crimes, even when no allegations exist!? Why has the concept of equal rights under the law gone out the window just because the vague idea of "terrorism" is evoked? |
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| MisterOpus1 |
John Yoo has done nothing but completely bastardize our law and embarrass our country. Time after time his horrible interpretations of the law and absolute Executive authority have been completely shot down either by Congress or by the courts.
Considering you haven't read the McClatchy articles that have demonstrated Bush wrongly branding innocent people as "enemy combatants", detained them, and tortured them, only to let them go without remorse or apology years later, I highly doubt you'll read the following retort by Glenn Greenwald of Yoo's pitiful op-ed piece. You should, however, because it highlights the blatant falsehoods that you neocons hold so precious as you support a man now at 25% approval:
| quote: | John Yoo's ongoing falsehoods in service of limitless government power
Bush's war crimes theorist claims that the Supreme Court protected "Al Qaeda terrorists" who were "captured fighting against the U.S." Both claims are false.
Glenn Greenwald
Jun. 17, 2008 | One of the most reliable methods for knowing that a position is unsustainable is that its advocates must employ outright falsehoods in order to support it. In a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed today, John Yoo defends the right of the Bush administration to imprison people at Guantanamo indefinitely with no judicial review and condemns last week's Supreme Court habeas corpus ruling as "judicial imperialism of the highest order." To do so, Yoo asserts what have become the now-standard though still-blatant falsehoods on this issue.
Yoo, for instance, claims that the Supreme Court in Boumediene allows "an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention." But huge numbers of detainees in U.S. custody weren't "captured fighting against the U.S." at all. Many were taken from their homes. Others were just snatched off the street while engaged in the most mundane activities. Still others were abducted while in airports or at work.
Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera camerman who was encaged at Guantanamo for years until being recently released, was simply traveling with an Al Jazeera reporter from Pakistan into Afghanistan to cover the U.S. invasion for his news network when he was stopped by a Pakistani immigration officer, turned over to the U.S., kept in an underground Afghan prison for six months, and then basically disappeared off to Guantanamo, where he remained for years, interrogated not about Al Qaeda, but largely about the operations of Al Jazeera:
| quote: | Asma al-haj didnt know what had happened to her husband until late 2002, when she received a letter from him explaining that he was in Guantánamo. Around the same time, Al Jazeera issued a press release announcing that an employee was being held at the camp. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld requesting information, but received no reply. For the next three years, little was known about the circumstances of al-Haj's detention, until early 2005 when he obtained the services of Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer based in Britain. . . .
Al-Haj was detained at a moment when distrust of Al Jazeera was accumulating rapidly at the highest levels of the American government. Before 9/11, Al Jazeera was hailed as a rare independent voice in the Middle East. But after the attacks, while Middle East specialists in the government continued to advocate that the U.S. engage with the network, others in the administration developed an intense hostility toward it. According to numerous former senior administration officials, the major hubs of animosity were the Office of the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense, particularly the offices run by Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, and Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence. |
Many of the highest-profile "War on Terror" detainees who have been held for years with no charges have been similarly "captured," while unarmed, in the most mundane of circumstances, far away from any "battlefield" -- not "captured fighting against the U.S.," as Yoo misleadingly put it today. U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, for instance, was detained at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.
Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri -- the computer science graduate student at Bradley University, in the U.S. on a student visa -- was arrested at his home in Peoria, Illinois where he lived with his wife and five children, charged with credit card fraud, only to then have his trial canceled at the last minute by George Bush, who declared him an "enemy combatant" and ordered him into military custody, where he remained for years with no charges.
Canadian citizen Maher Arar was also detained at the airport -- on a stop-over at JFK Airport on his way back from a family vacation to his Ottawa home -- and then sent to Syria to be tortured for 10 months, only for it to be discovered thereafter that he was completely innocent, that U.S. officials apprehended the wrong man. German citizen Khaled El-Masri was snatched up while on vacation in Macedonia, accused of being a Terrorist, shipped around to multiple countries, denied access to the outside world, tortured by the CIA for months, only to be released once they realized it was a case of "mistaken identity." And the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, Lakhdar Boumediene, was a Bosnia citizen, living in Bosnia, who was arrested by Bosnian authorities at the request of the Bush administration, investigated, and determined by the Bosnian Supreme Court to be innocent. But upon his being released, U.S. forces inside Bosnia immediately seized him and shipped him to Guantanamo.
Contrary to one of the core falsehoods spouted by people like John Yoo, a huge bulk of our "War on Terror" prisoners, including those at Guantanamo, were not "captured fighting against the U.S." at all. While supporters of unlimited executive power incessantly claim that the War on Terror can't be waged based on the premise that Terrorists are like criminals, many of the detainee apprehensions are identical to how accused criminals are captured, since -- unlike actual wars of the past -- they involve snatching people up while engaged in completely innocent activities and in civilian settings, not on battlefields while engaged in combat.
Yoo purposely uses falsehoods here because the way so many of these detainees are captured by the U.S. is what distinguishes them from detainees in past wars captured on actual battlefields. That's precisely what makes the risk of erroneous detentions (or more malignantly-motivated detentions, such as that of Sami al-Haj) so high. And it that's fact -- along with the fact that, by the administration's own claims, this is a "completely different war" that will last decades, not merely years -- that makes the very idea of empowering our Government to imprison such people indefinitely, with no real process, so dangerous and tyrannical. |
This second point really nails Yoo's complete bull down, pay attention:
| quote: | The other deeply misleading claim in Yoo's Op-Ed is even more transparent. He characterizes the Court's decision as "grant[ing] captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court." What minimally self-respecting law professor would be willing to make this claim with a straight face?
The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don't know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really "al Qaeda terrorists" or something else. That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out. As this recent superb McClatchy article documents, scores of individuals detained at Guantanamo for years weren't "Al Qaeda terrorists" -- or any other kind of terrorists -- at all. Rather, there were at least:
| quote: | dozens of men -- and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds -- whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.
McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials -- primarily in Afghanistan -- and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.
This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.
The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners. |
It takes an indescribably authoritarian mind to believe that one's own Government should have the power to put people in cages for life without having to provide them any meaningful opportunity to prove that they did not do what they are accused of. And it takes a deeply dishonest advocate to claim that the Supreme Court's ruling was designed to protect "Al Qaeda terrorists" who were "captured fighting against the U.S," given that large numbers of our detainees are not "Al Qaeda terrorists" and were not "captured fighting against the U.S."
With his attack on the Supreme Court, John Yoo has proven himself -- yet again -- to be both authoritarian and incomparably dishonest. But the two glaring falsehoods in today's Op-Ed -- that habeas protections protect "Al Qaeda terrorists" and that Guantanamo detainees were captured on the battlefield -- are precisely the ones that have been used for so long to obscure the real dangers of vesting our Government with the power of lawless imprisonment.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenw.../yoo/index.html |
Two quotes that need repeating:
| quote: | | The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don't know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really "al Qaeda terrorists" or something else. |
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| quote: | | It takes an indescribably authoritarian mind to believe that one's own Government should have the power to put people in cages for life without having to provide them any meaningful opportunity to prove that they did not do what they are accused of. |
How do we know they're terrorists?
"Because Bush said so"
How do we know again?
"Bush said they are, so they are"
But we let so many go.
"So?"
So if we let them go, did we just let terrorists go?
"No, we freed innocent men."
After 3 years we freed them, and they're not terrorists? Then why the did we lock them up then?
"Because Bush said they were terrorists, then we later found out they were not."
So it's still okay for the Executive to have that ultimate power to tell who's a terrorist, even when it's demonstrated later that so many were not?
"Yep."
Then how the hell do we know for certain the others in there are terrorists, ESPECIALLY when they have not even been given a right to a fair trial to rightfully defend themselves of such charges?
"We don't. Bush says they are until he says they're not. Stop asking so many questions. Why do you hate America?"
*sigh*
January 2009 can't come soon enough.
Oh, one last thing, that darn silly thing we call the Geneva Conventions, well it turns out that any international treaty we sign like Geneva just so happens to automatically become our law of the land, as it rightfully states in the Constitution. So we kinda have to abide by article III and IV in Geneva as a consequence. Dang treaties. Who needs 'em. |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
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Wait for another article or poorly worded reply that misses the core of the issue at stake completely.
Really, again, the fact that we even are debating this issue among Americans, in 2009, is absolutely disgraceful.
This is the CENTER of the issue, right here, and this is why the supreme court's decision was a landmark victory towards restoring the principles America has lost with this President. Liberty & Justice for all...
| quote: | | Are the core American principles only so strong that they can be applied within our own territorial borders? If we truly believe in the universality of our values, what is preventing their universal application? Convenience? Laziness? A lack of respect for those very values (rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, liberty, etc.) themselves? Why is it that every enemy combatant taken into custody is immediately assumed guilty of the most heinous crimes, even when no allegations exist!? Why has the concept of equal rights under the law gone out the window just because the vague idea of "terrorism" is evoked? |
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| The17sss |
| quote: | Originally posted by MisterOpus1
John Yoo has done nothing but completely bastardize our law and embarrass our country.
Oh, one last thing, that darn silly thing we call the Geneva Conventions, well it turns out that any international treaty we sign like Geneva just so happens to automatically become our law of the land, as it rightfully states in the Constitution. So we kinda have to abide by article III and IV in Geneva as a consequence. Dang treaties. Who needs 'em. |
I'm not well versed on the entirety of the Geneva Conventions, but isn't wearing actual military uniforms part of the guidelines encompassed in them? I'm just saying... because none of the people being taken in wear actual uniforms.
And John Yoo... didn't he direct Mission Impossible 2 and Face/Off? :tongue2 |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
I'm not well versed on the entirety of the Geneva Conventions, but isn't wearing actual military uniforms part of the guidelines encompassed in them? I'm just saying... because none of the people being taken in wear actual uniforms. |
Yeah, that was the initial defense used as to why the Geneva conventions don't apply. But looking for reasons to deny basic rights to people should be a glaringly un-American practice.
| quote: |
And John Yoo... didn't he direct Mission Impossible 2 and Face/Off? :tongue2 |
Those abominations of film are reason enough to dicount his opinion right there! :stongue: |
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| The17sss |
| quote: | Originally posted by Clovis
Those abominations of film are reason enough to dicount his opinion right there! :stongue: |
Finally! We have reached a common ground! :tongue3 |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
i too would like to quote lez coz that's precisely my position.
| quote: | Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
2. Are the core American principles only so strong that they can be applied within our own territorial borders? If we truly believe in the universality of our values, what is preventing their universal application? Convenience? Laziness? A lack of respect for those very values (rule of law, innocent until proven guilty, liberty, etc.) themselves? |
if the great liberal democracies can't maintain an admirable system of law, what right do we have to put pressure on the dictatorships and theocracies to reform their archaic political systems?
the US should be a leader by example. |
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| Krypton |
I read the Wall Street Journal everyday and let me you...It's a very conservative newspaper. All you have to do is look at the Opinion page. John Yoo? Come on! This guy is a hardliner Bush official who gave the green-light for the Administration to start torturing people. |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
This guy is a hardliner Bush official who gave the green-light for the Administration to start torturing people. |
But they want to stab Americans in the eyes!
Or, at least they do now! |
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| MisterOpus1 |
| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
I'm not well versed on the entirety of the Geneva Conventions, but isn't wearing actual military uniforms part of the guidelines encompassed in them? I'm just saying... because none of the people being taken in wear actual uniforms. |
That's not the case, and it's an unfortunate misnomer on the AM radio dial. jerZ07002 outlined why this is a few pages ago when he posted Geneva Convention Article 4:
| quote: | Geneval Convention Article 4
Article 4
Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
(1) Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces. |
Besides, as it's been asked here numerous times, why on earth would anyone feel it appropriate to accuse someone of a crime, and not allow that person a fair trial to defend themselves of that accusation against them? Does that make any sense outside of the Salem Witch Trials to do to anyone?
| quote: | | And John Yoo... didn't he direct Mission Impossible 2 and Face/Off? :tongue2 |
Well I don't know for certain just how familiar you are with John Yoo, but it does amaze me how supporters of the neoconservative philosophy that has effectively ran this Administrative's policies are not familiar with John Yoo. Google "Yoo Doctrine" for more information if you're not aware. |
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