Guantanamo - Three inmates kill themselves

"They are, in fact, military prisoners."

Then they are prisoners of war and, by definition, LEGAL combatants.

"As captured combatants go - legal or otherwise - it's not accurate to claim we're mistreating these people."

Holding someone for four years without giving them access to legal representation or a chance to defend themself is fair treatment?

"I realize the opposition press wants you to swallow that"

I'm British. I don't get my news from your press.

And let's replace "opposition press" with "your government" and fire that right back at you. Pointless, no?

"Simply because you weren't given the transcripts of the hearings doesn't mean they were unfair or never happened. You have no evidence either way, other than the word of a lot of people with political agendas."

If I have no evidence either way that something has happened, I sensibly assume it hasn't happened; just as I assume that a china teapot does not orbit between earth and mars, unless I hear of evidence that suggests otherwise.

In any case, why is an AMERICAN telling me that we should just trust our governments when they keep secrets from us? How can your democracy function if your people aren't informed of what your government is doing? I thought Americans were strongly in favour of transparant government and public accountability?

How can you possibly just accept it when your government says these people are getting fair treatment without demanding evidence? How can you be happy NOT having evidence of those hearings?

When the hell did freedom-seeking Americans become content to let their democratic government act without the public's watchful eye upon them?

"The only disappointment to me here is the number of people who are quoting directly off of leftwing anti-war blogs without admitting it."

Claiming that anyone who disagrees with you is just parroting a popular opinion they heard from someone else belittles you more than it does your opponant. It shows that you don't trust your opinions to stand on their own, and feel you have to rely in personal attacks to boost them.

Musuko.

The problem we are having here is the fundemental opposition between justice and freedom.

Justice demands that wrongdoers must be punished. It also says that failure to do this is a travesty and can even be extremely harmful. Justice also says that we should not punish the innocent.

Freedom says that as long as I obey the law I can not have my life, liberty and pursuit of happiness arbitarily taken from me. Not only that, but it also says that if I break the law there are proceedures to demonstrate to everyone that I did so before my freedom is taken away. Why do we need this? Because humans are flawed. Sometimes we make mistakes, we get the wrong person. More sinister are times when innocent people are deprived of freedom for the gain of those doing the imprisonment.

So, what is the problem? The problem is that to protect freedom we have to apply due process to everyone. If we don't then the whole system ceases to work. To protect freedom, we must sometimes accept imperfect justice and that hurts. Letting a criminal go because we can't prove their wrongdoing is a terrible thing, sometimes with devistating consequences.

We cannot let all criminals run free, so we must accept a certain amount of wrongful convictions, we must settle for imperfect freedom sometimes. We must also let the guilty go free sometimes to protect the freedom of the wrongfully accused. Public trials are an important factor in this because it exposes the accusers to scrutiny and ensures that their motives are to provide justice.

So here we are in guantanamo with a series of problems.
1. the detainees were not taken on US soil, nor are they US citizens so there is a legal argument not to apply protetctions given by US law to them.
2. the detainees were allegedly not afghani soldiers and therefore not subject to the rules concerning POWs
3a. Afghanistan had no recognized govenment at the time and consequently no laws to proscecute criminal behavior
3b. the detainees were removed from the country of Afghanistan
4. intellegence gained from could be comprimised by an open trial potentially putting many lives in danger
5. revelations about the treatment of the prisoners could cause anti-american sentiments or retalitory acts.

First, lets consider justice. Are the detainees deserving of punishment? Probably most of them are. The circumstances of their capture and the visible outcomes of the military tribunals suggest that they probably do deserve to be locked away forever. But there's no way to know, since everything was done in secret.

What are the implications for freedom?

With regard to US military operations I think it opens up the possibility for abuse. Probably not intentional targeting of politically inconvenient people, but more likely just sloppiness. People in the field, under great duress just saying, I'm not sure so I'm going to err on the side of detention. The temptation then becomes to find as many as possible guilty to avoid the political embarresment of mass release of wrongfully detained people.

More frightening are the implications for international preceedent. Any country could cite this as justification for making people disappear during an invasion.

I think we need to pass some new laws to define the status of people in this situation. I think we need to clearly define what safeguards there are to treatment of people captured in this way and what the path to resolution of their fate should be.

My personal feeling is that if these people are captured during combat they should be treated as POWs until they are charged with a crime. If they are charged with a crime then they should be given the rights of the courts where they are charged, be it a US court, a court in the country where they were captured or an international court.

Lets not have pursuit of justice make us trample the freedoms we value. We mustn't forget that the rights given to the accused are there to protect the innocent. The fact that they sometimes cause the guilty to go free is the price we pay for freedom. Sometimes freedom isn't free.

Well obviously you don't know that freedom cost a $1.05.

Briana Dawson

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/02/21/eu13032.htm

Europe: Pending Questions on CIA Activities in Europe

... or the front home page: http://hrw.org/


/Tina - God Natt - Thats EXAKT: Good Night!

Well said. As I recall, one or more human rights groups have been allowed to witness the tribunals.

-Kiamat Dusk

America! Fuck yeah! Gonna save the motherfuckin' day now!

-Kiamat Dusk

Uggg

That's a good start, do you recall who it was? What were the conditions under which they observed?

There is still a lot of grey area around these detainees and there is a need to resolve their ultimate fate of these people in a morally satisfactory way.

I'm sure that situations like this are going to happen in the future and I think we need to define the rules of conduct before it happens again.

Something about the 3 suicide detainee's. According to the New York Times:

All three men left suicide notes in Arabic, officials said. One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level Qaeda operative, another had been captured in Afghanistan and the third was a member of a splinter group, Admiral Harris said, in an account by The Associated Press.

Innocent people did not committ suicide. Criminals did.

Briana Dawson


Torley Linden:
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