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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Are you going to argue that the President of the United States does not have the power to sign treaties subject to ratification?
If the President's signature means that our state is bound by a treaty in international law, then by our Constitution, the President is not allowed to sign a treaty w/o 2/3's of the senate concurring.
Our Constitution does not allow our President to unilaterally enter our country into Treaties.
It takes a year to withdraw from the GC (see GC3, Article 142, e.g.)
Musclebound bod,bod,bod... from doing push ups p8q,non,p8q,non,p8q
Are you going to argue that the President of the United States does not have the power to sign treaties subject to ratification?" -- ondelette
"If the President's signature means that our state is bound by a treaty in international law, then by our Constitution, the President is not allowed to sign a treaty w/o 2/3's of the senate concurring.Our Constitution does not allow our President to unilaterally enter our country into Treaties."-- jschultz
Is there some reason why you just couldn't answer the question with a simple "No"?
Like, say, status of force agreements?
I'm really surprised you didn't come up with the rest of the Yoo and Goldsmith arguments: If a person is not a national to the country of the conflict, they can be deported, and therefore shipped to Guantanamo without any extradition, if a civilian has been arrested and not yet charged they can be deported since they are not yet a GC4 prisoner, and on and on and on. Cruel and unusual punishment doesn't apply before a prisoner is convicted of a crime, and all the rest. Importing definitions of severe pain that are supposed to govern when 911 gets called for Medicare patients for use in torture statutes.
Your arguments rely on a group of people hypothetically acceding to a treaty they are forbidden to accede to, and punishing them for failing to do so by treating them inhumanely. There is nothing in the Geneva Conventions that permits that, creative interpretation doesn't change that. If you want confirmation for your arguments, look up John Yoo's documents which relieve the U.S. of responsibility for Geneva vis-à-vis al Qaeda. They look a lot like what you write, and they are considered bad law by IHL experts. Yoo wrote the documents in January 2002, they are accessible on the web. So are Goldsmith's GC4 thingies.
On top of which, many of the al Qaeda arrests were made in a country that was not party to any conflict, and they weren't made on the battlefield. How do you determine that at the time of arrest they were not obeying the Geneva Conventions, or that they were military or civilian? Or even, in some cases, that they were not citizens of the country of conflict? If you arrest a Pakistani in Pakistan when your conflict is in Afghanistan, I'm sorry but that person doesn't have to display any arms openly, any sign, or be an Afghani, because you simply haven't picked him up in armed conflict in the war zone. Geneva doesn't allow you to speculate on what he might have done had he been on a battlefield, with respect to complying, based on his affiliation. But you round up Afghan goatherds for bounty in Afghanistan and transport them to Guantanamo, and you may in fact have committed a crime, since civilian deportation by occupiers is not allowed and you have no proof these people were belligerents. And your arguments would work, if they were valid, for rounding up all NGO/NPOs who are not Red Cross. Do you really think you can imprison and abuse CRS workers? The Vatican didn't sign Geneva either.
From what's known about Holder, he may be acceptable, albeit with reservations.
That stuff about his (possible) role in grabbing Elian Gonzalez, and what he once said about Internet speech, should be thoroughly examined.
I have been reading (not all comments....but) I wonder if the issue of the lack of a good investigation of 911 will ever opened again by the big wigs in DC? or the obstructions to that investigation? Reuters today reports about a new suit
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AI11B20081119
interesting.....like the radio interview about convicting or even trying the FISA violators ....seems unlikely and only tending to point out the deficits of the system.
I was incorrect when I said that if one HPC does not hold true to the rules of war, then the other side is also free to ignore them in response.
All right then.
The opinion that the Third Geneva Convention applies is just that - an opinion. That convention was not designed to cover a war-on-terror situation. Example: should the Chinese Uyghurs be repatriated to China? That's what the convention requires.
If POW status is denied, it does not automatically follow that you can torture prisoners or do what you want. That is just nonsense. And Holder never said he wanted to deny Article 3 protection to anyone. Glenn says that he wanted to do that, but it does not follow at all from his words. Glenn also says Holder's stance was repudiated by the Hamdan decision, but that's only true if we believe the worst interpretation possible.
Here's where Glenn (and yes, I did plow my way through the thread) is mistaken: from Holder's opinion that
they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war.
Glenn draws the conclusion that
the position espoused by Holder, Rumsfeld and the Bush administration was rejected by the Supreme Court in Hamdan, when it ruled that even Al Qaeda detainees are entitled to the minimum protections afforded to all detainees by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.
Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of lumping Holder with Rumsfeld, the Hamdan decision does not grant POW status. It grants Article 3 protection, which Holder at no place denies to anyone.
In Update II Glenn goes even further, deleting the "They are not prisoners of war" sentence to fit his ends;
Contrary to what several commenters have suggested, it seems clear that Holder -- in the 2002 interview -- was not merely arguing that Guantanamo detainees should be denied "prisoner of war" status. He was arguing, explicitly, that they were entitled to no Geneva protections of any kind (as he put it: "they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention").
On the contrary, when you add the deleted sentence, the very opposite is clear: that Holder was referring to the Third Convention, not the Conventions in their entirety.
Or this: Holder (still speaking of the Third Convention and in no way limiting Common Article 3):
entitled to be treated in a very humane way and almost consistent with all of the dictates of the Geneva Convention.
Glenn makes of that:
no Geneva protections of any kind.
Sorry, but this is wrong, and the insistence that it's right, is just stubbornness.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
