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rtwngAvngr said:My house has walls. It must be a gulag.
IControlThePast said:Read The Gulag Archipeligo, they didn't have walls :tng:.
no1tovote4 said:It allows for a Military Tribunal. This is what the US is using in GITMO and the reason that many of the "combatants" have been released.
As I stated previously, the Red Cross is there insuring that they are treated by the rules.
The hyperbole has only "justification" in the minds of people that want to make a political point, and are not working towards the actual rights of the prisoners that are held at GITMO. The similarities are manufactured out of whole cloth to make their point.
IControlThePast said:Less than 40 have been released. I don't know how accurate the Red Cross is, because they said several activities at the camp were "tantamount to torture."
http://nytimes.com/2004/11/30/polit...age&adxnnlx=1101843681-+nTyVVJpq8yXt1yEg4X28g
rtwngAvngr said:Torture like a bag on someone's head, or nudity?
that's only because we kept the beheadings secret!IControlThePast said:Prolonged extreme temperatures and beatings.
IControlThePast said:Less than 40 have been released. I don't know how accurate the Red Cross is, because they said several activities at the camp were "tantamount to torture."
http://nytimes.com/2004/11/30/polit...age&adxnnlx=1101843681-+nTyVVJpq8yXt1yEg4X28g
IControlThePast said:Less than 40 have been released. I don't know how accurate the Red Cross is, because they said several activities at the camp were "tantamount to torture."
http://nytimes.com/2004/11/30/polit...age&adxnnlx=1101843681-+nTyVVJpq8yXt1yEg4X28g
New battlefield reports indicate that at least eight and as many as 25 of the 202 prisoners paroled by the Pentagon from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have rejoined the fight as members of the pro-Taliban resistance in Afghanistan, or as part of al-Qaida. One of the now-free prisoners fighting in Afghanistan proudly proclaimed that he won his parole simply by lying through his teeth throughout the time he was at Gitmo. And the Pentagon blames fibbing prisoners and inadequate screening systemsdriven by this summer's Supreme Court terrorism decisionsfor allowing these men to escape from captivity.
no1tovote4 said:Amazingly the stuff you use as "proof" such as "less than 40 have been released" actually gives evidence to the contrary of your argument.
FYI, Rumsfeld is quoted to have said that around a dozen former detainees have already been recaptured on the battlefield. I bet they just got lost on their way home. Hey, let's give them a 'fair trial' in the UN lackey infested 'World court', with lots of International media attention, and the worlds top laywers!!!
There is a huge difference between some questionable questioning techniques and a Gulag, notice how the Red Cross has not said that the US is systematically torturing prisoners and only that some of the techniques might be considered....
However, just being able to read a report from them should reassure you that it is under International "oversite" and therefore not a Gulag.
Once again, the hyperbole is not serving AI well at all when they ignore far worse being done by others and get excited over hearsay evidence that a book was flushed down the toilet and then use that to describe the new "Gulags" of the US.
Comrade said:Please explain how a trial by an International body of the world court for every captured combatant will serve the national security of the United States? Or do you mean a trial via our own National courts with the media and the lawyers getting in the way of obtaining intelligence? Seems like a very foolish thing to wish upon the United States.
Because such a move would be unprecidented for a situation where an out-of-uniform combatant has been captured in every prior state of war among modern warefare.
Per Geneva, such combatants can be summarily shot as spies. (being out of the requirement for treaty protection.)
The fact we decline to do this is because we are better than that.
They have not only forsaken protection by International law and the treaty which supports it, they have also violated the ages old tradition of sanctuary. The concept of sanctuary is one you seem not to be able to recognize as a precondition for any fair treatment of captured combatants.
If you are conducting combat operations out of uniform and among innocents in a hostile zone, you willingly put at risk every innocent around and among your fellow Jihadists. This is quite intentional on your part, as a willing partner in the mass slaughter of civilian Muslims and Americans alike. But when then the armed Americans moved in, you're captured, you half-assed coward, you couldn't even go down fighting. And NOW you expect protection from some sort of Geneva Convenstions you violated repeatedly??? Well, sir, you're technically a spy, and spies get shot. But we're nice americans. We'll ship you off to a place with three squares a day, the best medical care in the world, and you can can even pray with your Koran five times a day, we'll even point out which direction.
But no, IControlthePast, says. This is horrendous. We need a fair trial, with witnesses, lawyers, and a jury of peers (Muslims?) to decides whether or not that AK-47 in your hands and grenades and RPG's in your bunker we're just collectors items. And you being a Saudi illegal in Iraq, you we're just there on vacation with your NRA friends, right? Well, holy crap, call Ted Turner, CAIR, Saddams lawyers, and the entire left wing media and let's get this media shitstorm going. All the while you won't have to spill a single drop of intelligence, which of course keeps your friends out of the red.
I mean, how do you propose this fair trial (of unprecedented proportions) of yours? How exactly will it go down, IControlthePast?
IControlThePast said:In the US you have to try a spy through a capital punishment case if you wish to execute him.
I'm for bringing the prisoners out of the legal black hole of Gitmo and into the United States. Also, the cases should be heard through our Federal Court system. The prisoners have a right to judicial review, even if it must be closed off to the media.
Because people violate the Geneva conventions is no reason to violate them back. Two wrongs don't make a right. It should be our goal to act less like the Terrorists, not more.
rtwngAvngr said:As pointed out before, we're not even close. You can't win a war when your opponent has no respect for human life whatsoever, and you're hamstringing yourself with a ridiculous standard of stupidity.
IControlThePast said:Do you think we're really that close to losing that we will be defeated if we give our enemies the right to a fair trial? I don't think we're close to the Terrorists, but that doesn't change the fact that our goal is to stop the human rights violations not create them, and if we want to move one direction on the moral scale it isn't towards the side the Terrorists are on. Our violations only fuel the Terrorists more and don't even help our cause. Look what happened when they thought we had violated the Quran. It certainly didn't deter them.
rtwngAvngr said:As much as you DO make an effort to be fairminded, ICTP, the people that are making a big legal fuss about this stupidity do not share your hope for america. No serious person could believe that the legal status we gives these terrorists could threaten our moral superiority. The people who hate us, hate us because they know we will stop their islamofascist evil, and in the new world order playbook of the left, it's " # 36 --use radical islam to destroy the individual and freedom oriented cultures created in europe" that we've reached. Page 666.
IControlThePast said:I agree with you that radical Islam that believes you're rewarded for killing people is the most dangerous threat in the world today, but Realpolitik is the major way it spreads. We're not concerned about being morally superior, but about just being as moral as possible. You don't run a race and slow down because your opponent is slow, you run the best time you can.
GITMO DETAINEES DESECRATE QURAN
By Michelle Malkin · June 03, 2005 09:57 PM
That's the headline you won't be reading over this AP story filed tonight on investigative findings released by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba.
Buried down in the AP story about Quran abuses at Gitmo, we learn:
[Hood] said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran," Hood's report said. It offered no possible explanation for those alleged abuses.
In the most recent of those 15 cases, a detainee on Feb. 18, 2005, allegedly ripped up his Quran and handed it to a guard, stating that he had given up on being a Muslim. Several of the guards witnessed this, Hood reported.
The WaPo headline over the AP story instead reads: "U.S. Confirms Gitmo Soldier Kicked Quran." But the article provides no further details of that single incident, instead reporting on one instance of a contract interrogator, not a soldier, stepping on a Quran and then apologizing. The contract interrogator was later fired. In other cases, the story notes, "a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran; water balloons thrown by prison guards caused an unspecified number of Qurans to get wet; and in a confirmed but ambiguous case, a two-word obscenity was written in English on the inside cover of a Quran."
The civil liberties Chicken Littles will again be up in arms. I've already received a late-breaking e-mail alert from CAIR assailing Gitmo's "climate of abuse." And the new media frenzy is already under way: here, here, here and here.
***Don't trust the MSM reports. Read the Pentagon's investigative findings for yourself here. See also the Pentagon news release, which puts things in proper perspective and the text of US military regs on handling the Koran. All in PDF. For those of you who can't read the files, I've included excerpts in the extended entry below.***
I repeat: Yes, there have been abuses by U.S. military personnel. Bona fide abusers should be, and from all reports appear to have been, investigated and punished accordingly. But as Charles Krauthammer writes powerfully in his column from earlier today, "the self-flagellation has gone far enough." Krauthammer's last words:
Does the Koran deserve special respect? Of course it does. As do the Bibles destroyed by the religious police in Saudi Arabia and the Torahs blown up in various synagogues from Tunisia to Turkey.
Should the United States apologize? If there were mishandlings of the Koran, we should say so and express regret. And that should be in the context of our remarkably humane and tolerant treatment of the Guantanamo prisoners, and in the context of a global war on terrorism (for example, the campaign in Afghanistan) conducted with a discrimination and a concern for civilian safety rarely seen in the annals of warfare.
Then we should get over it, stop whimpering and start defending ourselves.
Amen.
Update: Here's an interesting e-mail that just arrived...
Your article describing the treatment of detainees and their access to books other than the Koran is accurate. The detainees also have their own medical facility and an exercise yard where they run, play soccer and engage in other physical activities.
I know these things because I was a guard there from Dec. 2002 to Sept. 2003. I was in a National Guard infantry unit assigned to man the towers inside and the checkpoints around Camp Delta. I have seen these things firsthand.
I will never forget seeing an MP waiting at Guantanamo Bay Naval Hospital after being splattered by a detainees bodily fluids. You never hear about these incidents in the media and you never hear about MP's having to be tested for hepatitis and other infections due to these incidents.
Gitmo, like most detention facilities, will never approach any state of perfection. However, from what I have observed, most injuries to detainees were self-inflicted, such as attempted suicides.
That notwithstanding, the general atmosphere is not threatening. I cannot count the number of times a detainee would look up at me in one of the towers and give me a friendly smile and wave.
Prior to our units deployment to Gitmo we were trained to look for any sign of abuse toward the detainees and report it immediately. We were given cards with specific steps to take if such an event occured. This card became an inspectable item that we had to carry in our uniform shirt pocket when on duty.
This was all done to drive home to us the idea that we were there to do three specific things. We were to keep out unathorized personnel, prevent the escape of detainees, and ensure the safety of the detainees.
The correspondent also notes:
1.The international media makes regular visits (almost every week when I was stationed there).
2. The IRC is there all the time. They don't just make occasional visits.
3. The FBI is there all the time. Not just to make inspections.
Some gulag.
Update II: Miracles do happen. CNN gets a headline right: Detainees, not soldiers, flushed Quran
UPDATE III: The always-insightful Ed Driscoll makes an excellent point:
In other words, it's hypocrisy that hasn't been seen on this level since the left and the media (sorry to repeat myself) turned on a dime from claiming that Clarence Thomas trying to hit on Anita Hill was a Crime Against Humanity, but all of the charges that emanated from Bill Clinton's trousers was just between consenting adults.
If the media wants to claim that defacing the Koran in a POW camp full of captured terrorists is the crime of the century, then it needs to follow its own logic to its natural conclusion: no more claiming that "art" such as Piss Christ is a bold artistic statement. No more episodes like this on Law & Order and other TV shows, unless they're roundly condemned by the press. An article such as Rod Dreher's "The Godless Party" should be a multi-part investigative feature in the New York Times. There should be regular articles condemning the attacks of the ACLU against religious Christians or Christmas celebrations.
Because without a similar tone to coverage of religion in the US, Koran abuse stories at Gitmo looks exactly like it is: grandstanding hypocrisy of the worst order.
Exactly.
IControlThePast said:In the US you have to try a spy through a capital punishment case if you wish to execute him.
But why exactly? To undermine any intelligence gathering? To make you or the world 'feel good'?I'm for bringing the prisoners out of the legal black hole of Gitmo and into the United States. Also, the cases should be heard through our Federal Court system.
The prisoners have a right to judicial review, even if it must be closed off to the media.
Because people violate the Geneva conventions is no reason to violate them back.
Two wrongs don't make a right. It should be our goal to act less like the Terrorists, not more.
Art. 44. Combatants and prisoners of war
1. Any combatant, as defined in Article 43, who falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be a prisoner of war.
2. While all combatants are obliged to comply with the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, violations of these rules shall not deprive a combatant of his right to be a combatant or, if he falls into the power of an adverse Party, of his right to be a prisoner of war, except as provided in paragraphs 3 and 4.
3. In order to promote the protection of the civilian population from the effects of hostilities, combatants are obliged to distinguish themselves from the civilian population while they are engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack. Recognizing, however, that there are situations in armed conflicts where, owing to the nature of the hostilities an armed combatant cannot so distinguish himself, he shall retain his status as a combatant, provided that, in such situations, he carries his arms openly:
(a) during each military engagement, and during such time as he is visible to the adversary while he is engaged in a military deployment preceding the launching of an attack in which he is to participate.
Acts which comply with the requirements of this paragraph shall not be considered as perfidious within the meaning of Article 37, paragraph 1 (c).
4. A combatant who falls into the power of an adverse Party while failing to meet the requirements set forth in the second sentence of paragraph 3 shall forfeit his right to be a prisoner of war, but he shall, nevertheless, be given protections equivalent in all respects to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention and by this Protocol. This protection includes protections equivalent to those accorded to prisoners of war by the Third Convention in the case where such a person is tried and punished for any offences he has committed.
5. Any combatant who falls into the power of an adverse Party while not engaged in an attack or in a military operation preparatory to an attack shall not forfeit his rights to be a combatant and a prisoner of war by virtue of his prior activities .
6. This Article is without prejudice to the right of any person to be a prisoner of war pursuant to Article 4 of the Third Convention.
7. This Article is not intended to change the generally accepted practice of States with respect to the wearing of the uniform by combatants assigned to the regular, uniformed armed units of a Party to the conflict.
8. In addition to the categories of persons mentioned in Article 13 of the First and Second Conventions, all members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as defined in Article 43 of this Protocol, shall be entitled to protection under those Conventions if they are wounded or sick or, in the case of the Second Convention, shipwrecked at sea or in other waters.
Art. 45. Protection of persons who have taken part in hostilities
1. A person who takes part in hostilities and falls into the power of an adverse Party shall be presumed to be a prisoner of war, and therefore shall be protected by the Third Convention, if he claims the status of prisoner of war, or if he appears to be entitled to such status, or if the Party on which he depends claims such status on his behalf by notification to the detaining Power or to the Protecting Power. Should any doubt arise as to whether any such person is entitled to the status of prisoner of war, he shall continue to have such status and, therefore, to be protected by the Third Convention and this Protocol until such time as his status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
2. If a person who has fallen into the power of an adverse Party is not held as a prisoner of war and is to be tried by that Party for an offence arising out of the hostilities, he shall have the right to assert his entitlement to prisoner-of-war status before a judicial tribunal and to have that question adjudicated. Whenever possible under the applicable procedure, this adjudication shall occur before the trial for the offence. The representatives of the Protecting Power shall be entitled to attend the proceedings in which that question is adjudicated, unless, exceptionally, the proceedings are held in camera in the interest of State security. In such a case the detaining Power shall advise the Protecting Power accordingly.
3. Any person who has taken part in hostilities, who is not entitled to prisoner-of-war status and who does not benefit from more favourable treatment in accordance with the Fourth Convention shall have the right at all times to the protection of Article 75 of this Protocol. In occupied territory, any such person, unless he is held as a spy, shall also be entitled, notwithstanding Article 5 of the Fourth Convention, to his rights of communication under that Convention.
Art. 46. Spies
1. Notwithstanding any other provision of the Conventions or of this Protocol, any member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who falls into the power of an adverse Party while engaging in espionage shall not have the right to the status of prisoner of war and may be treated as a spy.
2. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who, on behalf of that Party and in territory controlled by an adverse Party, gathers or attempts to gather information shall not be considered as engaging in espionage if, while so acting, he is in the uniform of his armed forces.
3. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who is a resident of territory occupied by an adverse Party and who, on behalf of the Party on which he depends, gathers or attempts to gather information of military value within that territory shall not be considered as engaging in espionage unless he does so through an act of false pretences or deliberately in a clandestine manner. Moreover, such a resident shall not lose his right to the status of prisoner of war and may not be treated as a spy unless he is captured while engaging in espionage.
4. A member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict who is not a resident of territory occupied by an adverse Party and who has engaged in espionage in that territory shall not lose his right to the status of prisoner of war and may not be treated as a spy unless he is captured before he has rejoined the armed forces to which he belongs.
Art. 47. Mercenaries
1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
2. A mercenary is any person who:
(a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict; (b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities; (c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party; (d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict; (e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and (f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.
