Bush vs. Human Rights
Here's another article on Bush trying to weasle out of having to obey those pesky little human rights laws:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/politics/09gitmo.html?hp&ex=1100062800&en=ef8ed60281cb7cb4&ei=5094&partner=homepage
The article is about how a federal judge has ruled that the war crimes tribunals in Guantanamo Bay violate, or at least are not sufficient to conform to, the Geneva Convention.
At one point, the article states:
The government is in the midst of conducting a separate set of tribunals here at Guantánamo, similar to those required by the Geneva Conventions, to determine whether detainees were properly deemed unlawful enemy combatants. Those proceedings, called combatant status review tribunals, were quickly put into place by the Bush administration after the Supreme Court's ruling in June that the Guantánamo prisoners were entitled to challenge their detentions in federal court.
I think this confirms my earlier claim that the Bush administration had first tried to simply incarcerate these people without any legal proceedings at all.
The article later states:
The judge also said that in asserting that the Guantánamo prisoners are unlawful combatants and outside the reach of the Geneva Conventions, "the government has asserted a position starkly different from the positions and behavior of the United States in previous conflicts...
This confirms my statement that the Bush administration is trying to classify prisoners in such a way that it can avoid as much legal proceedings as possible.
Later, the article states:
The lawsuits consist of habeas corpus petitions, in which people may demand that
the government provide some explanation as to why they are imprisoned.
This implies that at one time, presumeably before the Supreme Court's order in June, the Bush administration was imprisoning these people without even telling them why they were imprisoned.
Two other key statements in the article:
...no American court could approve of any proceeding that had such a glaring lack of the right to confront one's accusers and the evidence.
and:
...it was inevitable that a federal judge somewhere would find fault with the administration's approach "that you can keep people locked up for two and three years and you still don't really know who they are and why we're keeping them."
posted by LeRoy at 6:07 AM
2 Comments:
We need to classify these individuals and give them due process.
If they are U.S. citizens, then U.S. laws apply. We deal with our own.
If they are soldiers from a recognized state, then the provisions in the Geneva Conventions apply.
If they don't fall into either one of these categories, the world needs to have an open forum and address the issue. Terrorist are the world's problem. Not just America's or Israel's problem.
However, if the U.N. had the guts to force Saddam into not breaking any of the resolutions, we would probably not be in this mess (war with Iraq). And if the U.N. had decided that it was better for them to go into Iraq with us rather than let us handle it on our own, there wouldn't be anyone in Guantánamo.
Now, I have a question. It was implied that the only way to control religious fanatics, zealots, insurgents, and terrorist is with a strong hand. Saddam had a very strong hand and he controled these people. Can you propose a method that is more humane?
-j
I agree that U.S. laws do not apply to non-U.S. citizens, but the laws approximate what we consider to be a just treatment of people, and in the absence of any other defined set of rules, I think we should start with the U.S. law as a guideline of how to treat these people.
In the case of terrorists, I don't see a huge difference between them and any other enemy. The only difference I can see is that they don't have a country to fight from, and the main reason for that is one of practicality. If any country admitted hosting them, we'd bomb them.
The main justifications I've heard for torturing suspected terrorists is that, first, their evil, so we shouldn't feel bad about it, second, it's worth it if we can get information out of them that will help us fight them, and possibly save more lives, and third, torturing them is the only way to get this information.
All of this makes perfect sense to me, and yet the Geneva Convention was written by people who were well familiar with war, right after WWII, and yet they still believed that the above considerations didn't justify torture. Also, I've heard it said that the quality of the information you get from tortured prisoners isn't nearly as useful as what you get from non-tortured criminals, or something to that effect, I don't remember exactly. Maybe it was something like there being a point of diminishing returns or something.
As to your question at the end, a strong hand is the best way to create fanatics, zealots, insurgents and terrorists, not control them.
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