What's happening with those poor devils at Camp Xray ???

My quote--

Tartarin wrote:

"How does treatment of Guantanamo prisoners compare with other prisoners of War?

"I don't think McCain got a lawyer during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton. Wolf, what makes you so sure they're being tortured? What do you consider torture?"
------
Sofia -- This is a perfect example of what we were talking about above -- acting as though America maintains higher values with respect to human rights and then using comparisons with lousy treatment by other nations to justify our lousy treatment of uncharged prisoners. It's a little like bringing up your kids by saying, As long as they're not behaving worse than the worst kids in school, that's okay.

How do you prove higher values without a comparison? It is certainly not to justify poor standards, but to illuminate comparatively higher standards. POWs don't rate lawyers. They do rate humane treatment, which I believe they are recieving. Of course, I haven't made a spot inspection. Neither have you or Wolf. On what do you base an opinion that POWs in Guantanamo aren't recieving humane treatment?

0 Replies

Sofia wrote:

POWs don't rate lawyers. They do rate humane treatment, which I believe they are recieving. Of course, I haven't made a spot inspection. Neither have you or Wolf. On what do you base an opinion that POWs in Guantanamo aren't recieving humane treatment?

Well, you'd first have to define "humane". Some would define "humane" in the same way as how they'd define "humane" treatment of US prisoners, for example. Others seem to think that anything better than what they would have gotten as enemy captives back home is "humane" enough.

To otherwise just restrict myself to sources given in this thread: early news stories had sounded pretty inhumane to me, but a link Walter gave in late August did note that "Since the detention center first opened in January 2002, it has grown from open-air, chain-link cells that some likened to animal cages to trailer-style quarters where detainees have a metal bed, a sink and toilets that flush."

On the other hand, an International Herald Tribune story he later linked in reported that

Quote:

Richard Bourke, an Australian lawyer representing a few Guantánamo detainees, told Australian radio that U.S. military officials were using "good, old-fashioned torture" to force confessions out of prisoners. Bourke said his assertions are based on reports leaked by U.S. military personnel and from descriptions by some detainees that have been released. "One of the detainees had described being taken out and tied to a post and having rubber bullets fired at them," Bourke reported. "They were being made to kneel cruciform in the sun until they collapsed."

0 Replies

The main point about the inhumanity of the situation often made, though, remains, as a Scotsman report linked in here noted, what "a senior Red Cross official labelled "a legal black hole"'.

Which goes to your, "POWs don't rate lawyers".

The main problem of Guantanamo Bay is that the US government doesnt recognize the inmates as POW's. Because POW's actually do rate "due process rights" - and the US doesnt want to grant them to 'em.

So that already answers your question about how the treatment of Guantanamo prisoners compares to those of "other POWs" - worse, since they're not recognized as such.

The same IHT article notes, in this context, that:

Quote:

Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention requires countries at war to grant POW status to all captured members of a government's regular armed forces - whether the government is diplomatically recognized or not. [..] Bush administration officials have [..] asserted that "regular armed forces" means having a responsible command, wearing fixed insignia, carrying arms openly, and conducting operations in accordance to the laws of war - therefore, the Taliban do not qualify. Factually, Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention contains no such requirements.

Considering comparisons I also found Thomas' paste in of an Economist table comparing the rights of the Guantanamo prisoners with those in a US court martial and the terrorism trials in N-Ireland striking.

0 Replies

Excuse my careless use of the term POW. I was aware of the legal status.

This is not an easy spot for me. I am against physical torture. I am not against other means, though, of extracting information from terrorists, which may save other innocent people.

Kneeling until exhaustion? For these people, considering what they did, and the murder they fought to justify and continue-- I can't come down on either side of this one without discomfort. War and terrorism aren't a Country Club. Ugly things happen. If they have information that could save innocent people--how far would you go to get it?

0 Replies

Sofia wrote:

Kneeling until exhaustion? For these people, considering what they did, and the murder they fought to justify and continue-- I can't come down on either side of this one without discomfort. War and terrorism aren't a Country Club. Ugly things happen. If they have information that could save innocent people--how far would you go to get it?

The dilemma is clear, but isn't the problem here that we don't know "what they did"? Considering they haven't actually been accused of anything and no trial procedures have started against them?

Doesn't the fact that they didn't wear uniforms, fixed insignia etc make it all the more likely that there's a fair share of people among them, about whose guilt of murder and terrorism those who took them were mistaken?

If they can indeed be found guilty of "fighting to justify and continue" murder and terrorism, why not (try to) try them?

0 Replies

Sofia -- the point is not how our current actions compare with someone else's. The point is how our current actions compare with what we want others to believe about us, what we say about ourselves, what we like (and are taught to) to believe about ourselves as a nation. We cannot allow the incursions on civil liberties and human rights which we are now witnessing while holding onto convictions about who we really are.

And one of the things which we don't condone is presuming people guilty before so proven.

0 Replies

Beautifully said.

0 Replies

As somebody has claimed in a previous post, we are in Iraq to bring stability to the region, it seems there are more terrorist activies in both Iraq and Israel since our invasion of Iraq. BTW, isn't bin Laden in Afghanistan or Pakistan where he runs his worldwide terrorist organization from? Funny way to fight terrorism - atleast in my book of "strategies to fight terrorism."

0 Replies

I'm not willing to sit through their OJ defenses, while a bunch of pony-tails try to make a name for themselves, and take down the US a couple of pegs in the process.

They were captured at war.

0 Replies

The interesting thing about the OJ reference is the willingness of many to rail on about OJ who was acquitted but whom they "know" to be guilty. How? Now that we are learning (thanks to the guys at Northwestern) how many people have been on death row who shouldn't have been, one would think we'd also learn how dangerous it is to presume guilt.

Perhaps the US needs to be "taken down a couple of pegs" if it's invested in an I-know-better-than-you-who's-guilty system of justice!

0 Replies

Oh, and let's not forget that the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq were "preemptive strikes" -- invasions -- not "war." Making the seizing of non-nationals and treating them as combatants becomes even more questionable.

0 Replies

cicerone imposter wrote:

As somebody has claimed in a previous post, we are in Iraq to bring stability to the region, it seems there are more terrorist activies in both Iraq and Israel since our invasion of Iraq. BTW, isn't bin Laden in Afghanistan or Pakistan where he runs his worldwide terrorist organization from? Funny way to fight terrorism - atleast in my book of "strategies to fight terrorism."

Formulating a policy of logic to fight terrorism is a tall order indeed since terrorism does not recognize boundaries or policies or logic. They came to us twice in New York, now they're coming to us in Iraq. It doesn't matter where we are after Aghanistan, the fight was on at that point. The enemies in Iraq weren't created just because we're there, they were already poised in many areas to confront us where ever.

The good news is, many of the radicals are being apprehended in countries where they are hiding by those countries, this is the key IMO to successfully fighting terror. Keeping the awareness and cooperation alive around the world is critical.

What happens after Iraq, who knows, Syria?

0 Replies

The DNA evidence, and testimony proved to anyone interested in the truth, that he was guilty. The jury was interested in letting a black guy off the way so many whites were let off before him.

They were caught during war.

0 Replies

"They were caught during war."

Of course the animosity the whole intelligence apparatus needs to keep up their jobs and life values wants to portray this as a war. A butcher sees a cow as meat.

0 Replies

Brand, The very best way to fight world terrorism is with the cooperation of the world community. Not by unilateral aggressive attacks on individual countries our president thinks posses a danger to us and the world. When our president preemptively starts a war with another country on the mistaken intelligence that they have WMD only makes our country lose credibility with the rest of the world community. Crying 'wolf' one time is one time too often, because it ends up killing thousands of innocent people and costing billions of dollars.

0 Replies

Exactly.

0 Replies

If I remember correctly, and I don't know if anybody else mentioned this, but it's my understanding we have nine British citizens at Camp Gitmo, and that PM Tony Blair has demanded/requested that they be sent home. Did anything come out of that issue?

0 Replies

Here ya go, CI: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/20/attack/main574345.shtml

Edited for an embarrassing, demeaning, misspelling.

0 Replies

Sofia wrote:

I'm not willing to sit through their OJ defenses, while a bunch of pony-tails try to make a name for themselves, and take down the US a couple of pegs in the process.

They were captured at war.

Doing what? We may have seen the videotape of OJ Simpson being arrested, but none of us has seen the videotape of each of those prisoners being arrested. So none of us knows what they were really doing -- all we have is press releases from one party of the trial that might bring it to light. Are these press releases credible? It seems clear that nobody would take Mullah Omar's word for what was happening during these people's arrest, so why would we take Donald Rumsfeld's? I certainly don't.

Earlier in the thread, Sofia wrote:

How does treatment of Guantanamo prisoners compare with other prisoners of War?

I don't think McCain got a lawyer during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton.

I think this gets to the heart of our disagreement. You hold America to the standards of a communist tyranny and find that it's behaving quite decently, judged by that standard. I, on the other hand, hold America to the standard of a democracy that upholds the rule of law, national and international. By that standard, I find it wanting. We are both correct of course, and there's certainly no 'right' and 'wrong' way to set standards. But it does surprise me that you choose to hold your country to such a low one. Isn't that rather unpatriotic of you?

For an overview of how America's 'Military commissions' compare internationally, here's The Economist's summary table from my post on page 3 again. It shows that they fall short even by standards as low as South Africa's prosecution of black 'terrorists' during the Apartheid regime.

http://www.economist.com/images/20030712/CUS320.gif

0 Replies

Obviously, Thomas, you and Tartarin prefer to intentionally attempt to twist my words to suit your purpose. I never said Korea (or Japan et al) are our shining example of how to treat combatants.

I do like to remind of the vast difference--and will do so on occasion.

Some of us do trust Rumsfeld's assessment over Mullah Omar's.

0 Replies

What's happening with those poor devils at Camp Xray ???

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know