-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
"We are merely exchanging long protein strings. If you can think of a simpler way, I'd like to hear it."
-Lee
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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The present administration is not laying claim to international law in this case as far as I can see. In fact, they want nothing to do with international law or international opinion regarding the prisioners at Guantanamo Bay.
The present administration has maneuvered the prisioners to such a place where neither international law nor American standards of justice have anything to do with their fates which are apparently to be adjudicated by military tribunal. The oposition has danced around the subject, but denying due process to the prisioners will be wholly on the heads of the present administration and not on some ghost of past international proceedings.
It is intellectually dishonest for the oposition to lay claim to the Nuremburg trials or on international law in general as some sort of binding precedent in defense of present administration policy regading the potential trails for the above reasons. Further, it is hypocritical make the claim due to the fact that the present administration has seen fit not to call the prisioners at Guantanamo Bay "prisioners of war" and have maneuvered them as far away from international scrutiny as they can.
Moreover,
quote:Because people have been silent on the subject for 50 years.
is dishonest in light of the fact that there has been no evidence of due process violations presented. Not one scintilla.
Nor are Nuremburg trials wholly analogous in the first place. The fact of the matter is that the present administration has placed the prisioners in a legal limbo where they can get the resuts they want more easily. All doen regardless of the fact that that places the proceedings outside the bounds of accepted legal standards.
Regarding Omega's silly post:
quote:Hey, aren't y'all the ones always yelling about how court rulings ARE law, regardless of any superceeding law?
Apparently, like Mr. Bush, you not here to nuance. Or to actually think for that matter.
All previous discussion regarding the primacy of court rulings that I've been involved in have revolved around the Supreme Court of the United States which the Constitution set as the controling court in decisions regarding the scope and limitations United States law.
We've never talked about international law to my memory.
Moreover, the rulings of any lower court are subject to review by higher courts and can not therefore be seen as wholly controling or the final word in any given matter.
I don't know the standing of precedent in international law, but I should think that the Nuremburg trial court was not a controling court on scope or limitation of international law. Rather it was criminal courts impowered to decide the guilt or innocence of prisoners of war under guidelines previoulsly set and by its charter.
And, as pointed out above, the present administration has move the proceedings out of the bounds of the international arena, therefore, there is no "superceeding" international law in this case.
[ April 29, 2002, 15:49: Message edited by: Jay the Obscure ]
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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The problem here I think is that there's no real consensus as to the status of the prisoners, what they should be defined as ("rabid dogs" works for me, but others no doubt disagree).
That's mostly because there's no real precedent for prisoner-taking of this kind... they don't meet the standards of Prisoners of War, they're not common street thugs, perhaps the best analogy would be members of some international criminal organization, and their agents in one particular country.
It's like a comic book, and they're Cobra (or Hydra, for those of you who like "Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.")
I wonder if there is a procedure anywhere for dealing with that type of organization. If not, we need one.
-------------------- "The best defense is not a good offense. The best defense is a terrifyingly accurate and devastatingly powerful offense, with multiply-overlapping kill zones and time-on-target artillery strikes." -- Laurence, Archangel of the Sword
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:Conspiracy, "Mere Membership," and Freedom of Association
The danger of criminalizing "mere membership" in a disfavored group is that it is essentially allows guilt by association, a concept anathema to American principles of justice. Not only does this approach offend due process, which requires individual guilt, it infringes upon freedom of association, a constitutionally-protected right.
But past experience demonstrates that the more threatening the group, the more likely it is that the line between mere membership and participation in an illegal conspiracy will be blurred.
The Nuremberg Precedent
The Nuremberg Charter specifically criminalized six organizations, including the SS, the SA, and the Gestapo. The underlying idea was that membership alone would make a defendant vulnerable to punishment. Indeed, allied planners intended to rely on organizational charges to prosecute large numbers of people in the trials subsequent to the main Nuremberg prosecutions, people against whom there was no individualized evidence but plenty of documentary evidence showing membership. (For various reasons, including developments in the political context, this did not happen.)
The Nuremberg judges, and even its prosecutors, were aware of the due process concerns implicated in criminalizing membership. In the end, the tribunal's actual practice was much more conservative than the Charter would suggest, including a narrower interpretation of organizational liability. (Some later courts read the Nuremberg precedent as requiring personal knowledge and active participation as predicates for organizational guilt.) No Nuremberg defendant was convicted simply on the basis of organizational membership.
Justice Robert H. Jackson, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, acknowledged that the Charter's rules on organizational liability "would be easy to abuse," although on his return to the U.S. he supported the punishment of alleged communists on the basis of organizational liability. Telford Taylor, one of Jackson's deputy prosecutors, learned a clearer lesson. On his return home, he developed a specialty of defending individuals accused of Communist Party membership.
quote:He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-Thomas Paine
[ April 29, 2002, 16:27: Message edited by: Jay the Obscure ]
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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quote:(Some later courts read the Nuremberg precedent as requiring personal knowledge and active participation as predicates for organizational guilt.)
Suspect that personal knowledge wouldn't be hard to get in a group as close-knit as the Taliban/AlQuaeda group seems to be. If you believe that they huddled around radios and such waiting to hear the news, then that's PK. If you believe that the plan was kept secret from the other members, maybe not. If they knew 'something' was going to happen, that's a grey area.
Active participation... well, these guys were mostly captured in combat, weren't they? That's quite a bit more than just having a Communist Party registration card in your wallet and going to meetings at somebody's house.
But I'll agree that JUST charging them with being a member would be wrong (assuming that's what will be done.)
-------------------- "The best defense is not a good offense. The best defense is a terrifyingly accurate and devastatingly powerful offense, with multiply-overlapping kill zones and time-on-target artillery strikes." -- Laurence, Archangel of the Sword
Registered: Mar 1999
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