171 replies to this topic

[freedom78]

Red Dawn kids...haha

Just more enemy combatants for the Soviet gulags.

[TAP]

In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then [Afghani] vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash, according to one diplomatic report. Massoud, the younger brother of the legendary anti-Soviet resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was detained by officials from the US and the United Arab Emirates trying to stop money laundering, it says. However, the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from.

[TAP]

http://www.theonion....pentagon,18572/

[freedom78]

In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then [Afghani] vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash, according to one diplomatic report. Massoud, the younger brother of the legendary anti-Soviet resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was detained by officials from the US and the United Arab Emirates trying to stop money laundering, it says.

However, the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from.

Didn't we already know this? It sounds familiar.

Anyway, stuff like THIS I have no problem with being leaked. It's the stuff that either (a) endangers people in a combat zone ( undermines our intelligence gathering efforts or © isn't anything representative of corruption and, thus, is only leaked to embarrass people who were trying to do their jobs. Corruption...I'm ok with that being leaked. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that we rely on the media to do such things.

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So we're supposed to hand over our leaders to some Spaniards? Even you can't support such a notion SLC. What if France finds Obama's continued use of Guantanamo two years after he promised to close it some type of war crime and demanded he be brough in for trial? People who refuse to play by the laws of war can't cry foul when they aren't treated like POWs.

The laws of war are SOOOO incredibly outdated. We haven't updated Geneva for 60 years. It desperately needs doing.

However, I find the premise that, because someone fights out of uniform, they don't deserve protections to be silly. If you were a civilian you wouldn't defend your country against invaders? By our current standards, most of our beloved revolutionaries were just illegal combatants. Not to mention those fuckin' Red Dawn kids.

Failing to simply wear a uniform is not my justification. Hiding among civilians and portraying yourself as such isn't conduct of a soldier. The Americans offer aide and adhere to basic humanitarian principles when we capture someone outside of the rules of war. You may want to bring up waterboarding against a small few, but that is nothing compared to beheadings and outright torture that insurgents utilize. And to your point, the militia in the american revolution were not given prisoners rights by England. They were treated as traitors and subject to death. If this was a red dawn scenario, I more than likely would either be with the military defending or operating as an insurgent myself. In either scenario, I'd expect treatment in accordance with my role. Though I would certainly make my status as an officer known if I was captured as an insurgent.



Either way I seriously doubt nations are going to agree to give POW status to civilians who hide behind children and in religious buildings. There is a stark difference between a professional Soldier and an insurgent.

[TAP]

In one astonishing incident in October 2009 the then [Afghani] vice-president, Ahmad Zia Massoud, was stopped and questioned in Dubai when he flew into the emirate with $52m in cash, according to one diplomatic report. Massoud, the younger brother of the legendary anti-Soviet resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, was detained by officials from the US and the United Arab Emirates trying to stop money laundering, it says.

However, the vice-president was allowed to go on his way without explaining where the money came from.

Didn't we already know this? It sounds familiar.

Anyway, stuff like THIS I have no problem with being leaked. It's the stuff that either (a) endangers people in a combat zone ( undermines our intelligence gathering efforts or © isn't anything representative of corruption and, thus, is only leaked to embarrass people who were trying to do their jobs. Corruption...I'm ok with that being leaked. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that we rely on the media to do such things.

Allegedly these leaks were taken from a database that 2-3 million people could access so either the US govt. has been ridiculously lax in intelligence security, or else the 'endangers' part has been blown completely out of proportion to shift the attention from the embarrassment to the messenger - whose alleged crimes are entirely irrelevant it should be noted.
From the last wikileaks leaks:
http://www.techdirt....e-sources.shtml

Back when Wikileaks leaked tens of thousands of documents on the Afghan war earlier this year, the US government went into full out assault mode against the organization, accusing it of all sorts of things, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates claiming that the leak had compromised "intelligence sources and methods," leading others to claim that Afghani informants were being killed over the leaks. That became a common theme, and we had numerous commenters insist that such informants were being killed. For many, it's now considered fact.

Turns out... it's not. The very same Robert Gates has now admitted that it turns out no intelligence sources were revealed. The same article quotes a NATO official as saying that "there has not been a single case of Afghans needing protection or to be moved because of the leak." Of course, considering how widely reported the claims of such leaks were, many will continue to believe it's been proven as fact, despite the very same person who kicked off the rumors now admitting they weren't true.

[freedom78]

So we're supposed to hand over our leaders to some Spaniards? Even you can't support such a notion SLC. What if France finds Obama's continued use of Guantanamo two years after he promised to close it some type of war crime and demanded he be brough in for trial? People who refuse to play by the laws of war can't cry foul when they aren't treated like POWs.

The laws of war are SOOOO incredibly outdated. We haven't updated Geneva for 60 years. It desperately needs doing.

However, I find the premise that, because someone fights out of uniform, they don't deserve protections to be silly. If you were a civilian you wouldn't defend your country against invaders? By our current standards, most of our beloved revolutionaries were just illegal combatants. Not to mention those fuckin' Red Dawn kids.

Failing to simply wear a uniform is not my justification. Hiding among civilians and portraying yourself as such isn't conduct of a soldier. The Americans offer aide and adhere to basic humanitarian principles when we capture someone outside of the rules of war. You may want to bring up waterboarding against a small few, but that is nothing compared to beheadings and outright torture that insurgents utilize. And to your point, the militia in the american revolution were not given prisoners rights by England. They were treated as traitors and subject to death. If this was a red dawn scenario, I more than likely would either be with the military defending or operating as an insurgent myself. In either scenario, I'd expect treatment in accordance with my role. Though I would certainly make my status as an officer known if I was captured as an insurgent.



Either way I seriously doubt nations are going to agree to give POW status to civilians who hide behind children and in religious buildings. There is a stark difference between a professional Soldier and an insurgent.

Nazis were intentionally killing civilians in droves and were accorded POW status. The Japanese were torturing the shit out of their prisoners, and were accorded POW status. Since nothing I've seen in the last 10 years rises to that level, it's tough to point to anything OTHER than the uniform as the only real difference. Of course, the distinction between acting honorably and in accordance with the laws of war is the mark of a good soldier. We should expect it of our soldiers and of any opposition they face. When it isn't done, we should still give POW status and prosecute for war crimes where a case can be made. The premise that someone breaking the law can be summarily tortured and/or executed is blatantly wrong. The question isn't whether you give it "to civilians who hide behind children and in religious buildings". The question is whether combatants, including those who are part of an insurgency, rather than a traditional uniformed state based military, are deserving of the same protections. The use of human shields should be considered as a war crime, whether done by those in or out of uniform.

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Some Nazis were killing civilians in droves. Not all or even a majority. And the extent of the holocaust wasn't known until after the war. They still wore uniforms and abided by standard conduct in warfare. To a lesser extent so did the Japanese. It also serves to mention that geneva didn't exist at this time, so international rules and conduct were not what they are today. And as you stated, they were held accountable for their behavior. Germans or Japanese weren't starppping bombs to themself and going into populated civilian areas in their own countries. Present Muslim insurgents are. Freedom, you have to admit an easy distinction between the roles and behaviors of the earlier mentioned Soldiers versus the present insurgents. If nothing else, one was state sponsored and supported while another is not. I thought most people leaning to the left were against military tribunals? If I were not in the military and walked into a mall and shotup/blewup a hundred people, would you argue that the civilian authorities or military have control over me? I infer that by your standard, anyone who fights for a deemed political cause should be afforded protections under geneva. Do you realize what that means? No more nice food and sleep schedules in air conditioned quarters. If we treat Al Qaeda like POWs, they'll be building their own cells and put to hard labor. No more special lawyers or ACLU involvment. You can't have it both ways. Either they're a POW and treated as such, or they're non-military combatants subject to a different rule of law and standards. The issue is further compounded by the reality that a POW has a known country to be returned too. Last time I checked, we had to fight to place these people in nations as no one wants them. And the american public would be damned if Mohammed gets released on an ACLU technicality bullshit charge and is walking down Manhattan by 2:00. If you truly want to define a definition for determining combatant status, I think's one's relationship to a soverign state acting in a sanctioned capacity should be the standard. As all these Arab nations denounce terrorism and none santion their behaviors, they can't be considered official state representatives. Compounded with their devotion to a Muslim/Arab ideology rather than state identification, the issue is even more difficult to distinguish.

[freedom78]

Some Nazis were killing civilians in droves. Not all or even a majority. And the extent of the holocaust wasn't known until after the war. They still wore uniforms and abided by standard conduct in warfare. To a lesser extent so did the Japanese. It also serves to mention that geneva didn't exist at this time, so international rules and conduct were not what they are today. And as you stated, they were held accountable for their behavior. Germans or Japanese weren't starppping bombs to themself and going into populated civilian areas in their own countries. Present Muslim insurgents are. Freedom, you have to admit an easy distinction between the roles and behaviors of the earlier mentioned Soldiers versus the present insurgents. If nothing else, one was state sponsored and supported while another is not.

I thought most people leaning to the left were against military tribunals? If I were not in the military and walked into a mall and shotup/blewup a hundred people, would you argue that the civilian authorities or military have control over me? I infer that by your standard, anyone who fights for a deemed political cause should be afforded protections under geneva. Do you realize what that means? No more nice food and sleep schedules in air conditioned quarters. If we treat Al Qaeda like POWs, they'll be building their own cells and put to hard labor. No more special lawyers or ACLU involvment. You can't have it both ways. Either they're a POW and treated as such, or they're non-military combatants subject to a different rule of law and standards. The issue is further compounded by the reality that a POW has a known country to be returned too. Last time I checked, we had to fight to place these people in nations as no one wants them. And the american public would be damned if Mohammed gets released on an ACLU technicality bullshit charge and is walking down Manhattan by 2:00.

If you truly want to define a definition for determining combatant status, I think's one's relationship to a soverign state acting in a sanctioned capacity should be the standard. As all these Arab nations denounce terrorism and none santion their behaviors, they can't be considered official state representatives. Compounded with their devotion to a Muslim/Arab ideology rather than state identification, the issue is even more difficult to distinguish.

Geneva III, relating to POWs, was implemented in1929. It later had to be improved upon, largely because it was being abused and, during WWII, no protections were being given to civilian populations. Non-uniformed combatants, then, since they're not military must be civilians. The question remains as to whether you treat them as POWs or as criminals. Indeed, incapable of "having it both ways, we have chosen neither. It's a very dangerous precedent to allow the state to seize people and detain them indefinitely. Furthermore, the issue is confounded by combining insurgents and terrorists into one group, as if they were identical or (even if that were the case in the so called "War on Terror"), as if an exception means the distinction is invalidated in all other instances.

If the ACLU is involved, that's our own stupid fault. With the exception of 9/11 and a few other instances, the vast majority of our interaction with insurgents/terrorists has occurred overseas. They could have been held and/or tried in other countries. We bring them to US territory and then are surprised when some want then to be afforded legal protections that are given to anyone, citizen or otherwise, who is detained in the United States. In other words, if you never bring them here, you don't have the problem.

[TAP]

http://www.guardian....sange-wikileaks
http://www.bbc.co.uk...canada-11882092

After this latest release a Pentagon official, who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the material involved, told the McClatchy newspaper group that even three months later the US military still had no evidence that people had died or been harmed because of information gleaned from Wikileaks documents.

Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers which detailed government lies and cover-ups in the Vietnam War, is sceptical of whether the government really believes that lives are at stake.

He told the BBC's World Today programme that US officials made that same argument every time there was a potentially embarrassing leak.

"The best justification they can find for secrecy is that lives are at stake. Actually, lives are at stake as a result of the silences and lies which a lot of these leaks reveal," he said.

"The same charges were made against the Pentagon Papers and turned out to be quite invalid."

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So because they can't declaratively say that this person died because their name was revealed in a leak, that means it's acceptable to pose the risk? Nothing absolutely earth shattering will ever come from these leaks. All truly important and sensitive data is labeled top secret and stored on a network completely removed from ready access. Some closet-gay (yet apparently open) Soldier would never pass the rigorous 15 month background check to gain top secret clearance. Why because it would serve to be used as blackmail or in this case, could be used as an agenda to publish classified material. Bradley Manning and the wikileaks organization are not heroes for releasing this information. Nor should we not hold them fully accountable because worst case scenarios have not manifested itself yet.

I fully support transparency. But releasing hundreds of thousands of documents out of context with absolutely no consideration for security and personal consequences is the type of behavior expected from a child. What the world is receiving are snippets of a document that create the most attention for their headline. People are then unable to make an intelligent decision based on complete information. What the most vocal, ardent supporters of this wikileaks and the supposed corruption implications fail to understand, is that they are no different than the moronic tea partiers who jumped on snippets such as "death panels" to justify their already biased position. It's intellectually dishonest and those who profess to be vindicated by these documents are nothing more than 9/11 truthers who more than likely possess a sub 100 IQ.

[PERM BANNED]

Geneva III, relating to POWs, was implemented in1929. It later had to be improved upon, largely because it was being abused and, during WWII, no protections were being given to civilian populations. Non-uniformed combatants, then, since they're not military must be civilians. The question remains as to whether you treat them as POWs or as criminals. Indeed, incapable of "having it both ways, we have chosen neither. It's a very dangerous precedent to allow the state to seize people and detain them indefinitely. Furthermore, the issue is confounded by combining insurgents and terrorists into one group, as if they were identical or (even if that were the case in the so called "War on Terror"), as if an exception means the distinction is invalidated in all other instances.

If the ACLU is involved, that's our own stupid fault. With the exception of 9/11 and a few other instances, the vast majority of our interaction with insurgents/terrorists has occurred overseas. They could have been held and/or tried in other countries. We bring them to US territory and then are surprised when some want then to be afforded legal protections that are given to anyone, citizen or otherwise, who is detained in the United States. In other words, if you never bring them here, you don't have the problem.

Right, which is what I meant when I said Geneva didn't exist. You can't hold people accountable for laws that don't exist yet. I absolutely do not condone indefinite detainment. POW or Criminal, some sort of objective judicial process needs to occur to determine guilt.

And simply residing in the United States, citizen or not, does not confer equal rights. I don't need to list numerous examples of such differences. They were brought here under the legal decision that they were not afforded the same rights as a civilian criminal or a POW. How can the US charge someone as a civilian when their crime is committed outside of US Jurisdiction? If I go to Germany and shoot 15 people, the state of Ohio can't charge me for murder. Just as if I speed in New York, California can't give me a citation. Now obviously the US could work with the German government to extradite me to face trial. But the US itself has no authority to charge me. With these detainees, we have an arrangement with the nation they are captured in to bring them to a US territory. These are special circumstance for special individuals and in turn, deserve special treatment and legal standing.

[TAP]

I love how white American conservatives can switch so easily from small government libertarians who couldn't possibly contribute a cent of their tax money to socialist medicin, to big government authoritarians who are fake-concerned that something that hasn't lead to a single death but might have. Love the criticism of foreign governments for corruption and incompetence, given that the entire govt system here is bought and paid for by oil companies, wall street and other corporations and Sarah Palin is a leading candidate to be the next president. I also love the smell of irony in the morning.

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I love how white American conservatives can switch so easily from small government libertarians who couldn't possibly contribute a cent of their tax money to socialist medicin, to big government authoritarians who are fake-concerned that something that hasn't lead to a single death but might have. Love the criticism of foreign governments for corruption and incompetence, given that the entire govt system here is bought and paid for by oil companies, wall street and other corporations and Sarah Palin is a leading candidate to be the next president. I also love the smell of irony in the morning.

Then why do you want to be a citizen? Sounds like you might be better off staying in England. Unless you're a sadist, you're not going to be very happy here.

[TAP]

I love how white American conservatives can switch so easily from small government libertarians who couldn't possibly contribute a cent of their tax money to socialist medicin, to big government authoritarians who are fake-concerned that something that hasn't lead to a single death but might have. Love the criticism of foreign governments for corruption and incompetence, given that the entire govt system here is bought and paid for by oil companies, wall street and other corporations and Sarah Palin is a leading candidate to be the next president. I also love the smell of irony in the morning.

Then why do you want to be a citizen? Sounds like you might be better off staying in England. Unless you're a sadist, you're not going to be very happy here.

Have you been lurking around all day just to add that zinger as soon as I posted? I love living here, fortunately I don't get to spend much time with white conservatives, whackaloon GOP senators or Sarah Palin - I can't even see her from my back yard. Why do you stay here if you hate big government so much?