Dlowan
As I suspected you threw a load of platitudinous rhetoric at the wall, hoping I would swallow some of it...........not a chance. Below you will find the legal discourse with justification for the President's decision to proceed on the path that he is following by using the term "enemy combatant" for those captured or detained in our war against the Islamist Fascists who want to take us all back to the sixth century.
This is the source and below is an excerpt which puts it all into perspective:
http://www.fed-soc.org/Laws%20of%20war/enemycomb.pdf
< It is well settled, in both international and U.S. domestic law, that individuals captured in war may be detained during the conflict and they are not entitled to all of the elaborate due process rights guaranteed to criminal defendants. (These include the right to retain and consult with counsel) The enemy combatants detained in the war against terror, like other prisoners taken in war before them, have not been subjected to a criminal justice process. Their confinement is not for purposes of punishment or deterrence. Rather it is to ensure that they do not return to the fight against the United States. If criminal charges are actually brought against any of the detainees, they will be entitled to counsel, and all of the process that is due, at that time.>
This then is the basis for the decision and I would have chosen the same course of action even knowing that my critics in the press would probably try to turn it into a debate with never ending intellectual ramifications which is exactly what you and all the sob sisters on this forum want to do.
The requirement to gain information from those captured to assist the president in his responsiblity to protect the American people plus the absolute neccesity to prevent any of those captured from returning to combat were ample justification for this decision and this was confirmed by the Presidents legal advisors as is evident in the source document.
Your assertion that the US military should be taking action to punish those guilty of abuse of the established guidelines is a valid point but you fail to recognize that they (the US military) are doing exactly that by conducting investigations in every reported abuse..........You and the world wide media just don't accept the evidence so I recommend you take off your blinders.
Furthermore, your platitudes regarding healthy debate are absolutely meaningless this far into the game.........debate causes divisiveness which is exactly what the our enemies are hoping for as in the case of the lost war against the communists in North Vietnam. Walter Cronkite sealed the loss in his Feb 1968 broadcast (after a few days in Vietnam) in which he concluded that the US was "Mired in Stalemate" and that the war was "unwinable". I hope never again to see the power that he wielded during that evening broadcast. Endless debates by intellectuals have never yielded anything but divisiveness but that is the price we pay for living in freedom and that is the foundation for my rage that you commented about. The destructiveness of endless "debate" creates a sense of frustration which results in a feeling of rage against those who are so blinded by an ideology that says "ALL WAR IS BAD" and if only we stick our heads in the sand and debate it, it will just go away.
If you want to help the enemy.........then continue on with your drivel about debate and endless misguided criticism of our military which you swallow from the New York Times or any other overly critical news source such as Al Jazeera.
). i like mccain. quite a bit actually. he's one of the few republicans that could possibly lure my vote back to the gop. note i say possibly. the current crop doesn't have much in common with those i voted for in the past. mccain ? sorta does...