Obama and the detainees: reversing Bush?

Barack Obama has wasted no time reversing some of President Bush’s most controversial policies concerning the interrogation, imprisonment, and trials of foreign terrorist detainees.

Or has he? If you read the linked article carefully, you’ll see that the thrust of many of Obama’s actions so far has been to halt things in order to study them for a while, and with the plan to make more permanent decisions later.

Yes, coercive techniques such as waterboarding have been prohibited, and Guantanamo is supposed to close in a year. The CIA’s network of alternate detention facilities can no longer hold prisoners long-term. But:

…[Obama’s] orders leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guanté¡namo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured…

The decision to stop the commissions was described by the military prosecutors as a pause in the war-crimes system “to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally and the cases currently pending before the military commissions, specifically.”

I’ve written extensively on many of the legal issues involved in the detainment and treatment of terrorists (see this, this, this, and this, for example). My main concern with Obama and the approach I think he will take is that he sees dealing with captured terrorists as a task for our regular criminal justice system. But that system was never designed to deal with terrorists, and there is a perfectly good—and far more appropriate—legal system in place for that: military law.

The fine tunings of how military law ought to apply in each case can be argued. But the full protection of the laws designed to protect our own civilian citizens, and most especially the very open rules concerning discovery (what the defense is allowed to know in a criminal case), are destructive and dangerous when applied to terrorists. It remains to be seen just how far Obama will go in the direction of allowing terrorists access to those rules and those protections.

Comments

Obama and the detainees: reversing Bush? — 57 Comments

Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 3:28 pm said:

I was amused to see the media frame this in essence as an immediate reversal, when it fact Obama called for immediate meetings to decide whether to reverse Bush’s decisions – not the same thing at all.

It was kind of a head fake for the left. Obama surely is bright enough to realize that if he does something perceived to be soft on terrorists he’ll be giving hostages to Fortune. The first guy he turns loose who returns to the US to kill Americans and not only is Obama’s honeymoon is over, but his Presidency will be in big trouble, because those deaths will be laid at his door, Messiah or not.

So instead, if he’s smart, he’ll temporize, as he’s doing now. Call for meetings to discuss recommendations to be submitted to a deliberative committee for consideration by a panel to draft a policy for review by another body, that sort of thing.
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 3:52 pm said:

As I said elsewhere… more than 60 others who were let go, returned to the battle field…

Obama will not be so lucky that those he let go will not be the same… however, imagine being the person responsible for letting go a person who came back and did something…

we are looking at so many different ways to create a level of civil unrest that its hard to believe that when the young girl of our neo politics wakes up, she will realize that last night wasn’t romance and kisses, but drink and rape… it will get nasty..

at that point the concepts of preventing the counter-revolution happen. we already have red terror and don’t realize it yet. see How British bureaucracy crushed British fishermen if you know how things work, you will realize that the people in this town, are the kulaks, and what’s happened to them, is a kangaroo court, and now the remainders are too scared to work… that’s what red terror is… it doesnt get nasty till later (like in the sanford experiment), when there aren’t enough lorry jobs and other things for those kicked out from centuries old family businesses to go to and they get angry enough to eject the people in power. they then take off the mask, and open fire into the crowd…

from the fishermen’s point of view the story looks rather different. Hake were abundant around Cornwall in 2002, but EU quotas were so tiny that the fishermen could catch their entire month’s allowance in a single haul, making it virtually impossible to earn a living. This was why they logged their over-quota catches as different species. Although Judge Wassell claimed that quota had been available, the court had heard no evidence on this (the fishermen themselves were not permitted to speak in their own defense).

here is what I said in response
why let evidence get in the way of a good conviction? This is why socialist states get rid of the rule of law!!! In favor of totalitarianism… they are incompetent, incompetents can’t catch criminals or do investigations. Also that stuff is expensive… does one have a court case when ones dog eats some food from the cats dish? No, one disposes of the problem animal, and so cheaply solves the problem. If you don’t believe that’s how socialists think, remember it was Stalin who said. No man, no problem!!! And the system evolved to the more efficient way to remove problems. Pick someone at random, prosecute them, and let the fear keep the others from acting at all. in case one hasn’t noticed, this is exactly what they are doing to this town!!!!!! They are selecting people… asserting evidence that doesn’t exist… not allowing the enemies of the state to defend themselves… doing so publicly, and they are destroying some families and businesses leaving them broken… this is RED TERROR… the rest of the community has no way to know how to work and not end up prosecuted. They have no hope of defending themselves once snagged, and they know they will be destroyed… by the way… for 40 years the same process was used by feminists to destroy the family by gender Marxism and making the male the kulak capitalist

so these things have nothing to do what’s being given to us for consumption.

the reason we think they are nuts, delusional, etc… is that we can only reach that conclusion by refusing to abandon the concept that they are there to help us!!!

Here is an example:
When Israel is forced into war, it seems to drive the Muslim world and the media into a mania that is divorced from reality.

see? 40 years and these successful lunatics keep winning…
[at what point do we stop thinking them nuts and take everything seriously?]

only if you believe what you’re seeing is what you’re seeing and incorrectly attribute things. They are not divorced from reality, they are working reality by other means to an end. you can write, muse, and call them crazy, delusional, etc.. and because of such never understand why that succeeds!! Maybe its not crazy, delusional, etc… maybe their behavior will grant them ownership of everything and deny you ownership of anything!!!! if that’s so, then who is the one that is divorced from reality and the material world? The one that uses impericism falsely to achieve such and end? or the one that accepts the false reality positions that change empiricism to be dysfunctional, and so cant understand how these delusional people are where they are? They are using valid empiricism to inform their games, while at the same time redefining the facts, so that the other side operating on them is ineffective and crippled — I don’t call that delusional!!! I call it a scary form of being more real than modern real

So who or what is coordinating all this? Who supplies the suppliers that get blamed?

Gaza was battle in bigger war
prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/gaza-was-battle-in-bigger-war.html

The point is that this is a smaller part of a larger war.. The Guantanamo is part of that larger war.

However, you have to go up two levels to stop it. And we refuse to go up two levels… which is why using a proxy state of a proxy state works.

“Hamas takes inspiration, funding, and instructions from the ruling mullahs of Iran” and then the dialogue stops or they list out other clients. but who supplies Iran? Who get their instructions, funding, weapons, and expertise, from Russia, no? see how adding a middle man allows Russia to sit around and let their flunkies the one level down take the heat, and insure that the great game will go on till they win

Do not judge Russia by its people, the people don’t rule… [so to judge things by western standards is to not understand things. western armies are voluntary. Behind the Russian gru army is the kgb army… they shoot the gru when they turn around. so if you think that they care about their people and such things advise their choices, your going to be VERY mistaken… people are material, like horses… you don’t care if a horse dies in service to you? do you? well then tell the medical industry and renderers to stop]

see: The Putin-Chavez axis by Robert Amsterdam
prairiepundit.blogspot.com/2009/01/putin-chavez-axis.html

to draw an analogy…

Imagine going after the SS… But your not allowed to admit that they are being run and controlled by the German socialists high command. The view is akin to Hitler and the German command being invisible, and the only thing people can see are the SS..

And no matter how many ss they get rid of, they can’t understand why more keep appearing, as if there is some invisible force…

well yeah.. look at the made in label on the boxes you capture… look at what your own agencies tell you… look at history… look at what defectors have said… read the auto biographies of people like Ceausescu… they admit it…

so its like the German high command being invisible (because our high command is the same way and if we exposed the other, they would expose themselves!!!!)… and yet they admit they are in control.. but we have to ignore that.. cause the real problem is not the disease that keeps infecting everyone from the same typhod mary, its the people they infected. Well that way nothing will change till one side runs out of people.

Read this:
The Arafat I Knew…
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/home/comartin/israel/pacepa-wsj.html

I am not surprised to see that Yasser Arafat remains the same bloody terrorist I knew so well during my years at the top of Romania’s foreign intelligence service. I became directly involved with Arafat in the late 1960s, in the days when he was being financed and manipulated by the KGB. In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel humiliated two of the Soviet Union’s Arab client states, Egypt and Syria. A couple of months later, the head of Soviet foreign intelligence, Gen. Alexander Sakharovsky, landed in Bucharest. According to him, the Kremlin had charged the KGB to “repair the prestige” of “our Arab friends” by helping them organize terrorist operations that would humiliate Israel. The main KGB asset in this joint venture was a “devoted Marxist-Leninist”–Yasser Arafat, co-founder of Fatah, the Palestinian military force.

When you read, you will see again, that its always a proxy… the Russians (kgb) used the Romanians (die), who used Arafat (plo) who used the poor uneducated Palestinians (civilian useful idiot horses). Throw them in front of the truck, and get the world angry at the driver… everyone forgets who threw them. heck, its like an insurance scam.

but that’s the point… they don’t want it to end until either Judaism capitulates and reforms to be like the Russian orthodox church, a political tool… or be an oppressor and the only choice is eventual removal over time (which makes genocide acceptable!!! (just do it slowly) after all, if the US killed the 50 million who were aborted all at once after they were born and by force instead of trickery, what would we be?)

In 1972, the Kremlin established a “socialist division of labor” for supporting international terrorism. Romania’s main clients in this new market were Libya and the PLO. A year later, a Romanian intelligence adviser assigned to the PLO headquarters in Beirut reported that Arafat and his KGB handlers were preparing a PLO commando team headed by Arafat’s top deputy, Abu Jihad, to take American diplomats hostage in Khartoum, Sudan, and demand the release of Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian assassin of Robert Kennedy.

“St-stop th-them!” Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu yelled in his nervous stutter, when I reported the news. He had turned as white as a sheet. Just six months earlier Arafat’s liaison officer for Romania, Ali Hassan Salameh, had led the PLO commando team that took the Israeli athletes hostage at the Munich Olympic Games, and Ceausescu had become deathly afraid that his name might be implicated in that awful crime.

It was already too late to stop the Abu Jihad commandos. After a couple of hours we learned they had seized the participants at a diplomatic reception organized by the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum and were asking for Sirhan’s release. On March 2, 1973, after President Nixon refused the terrorists’ demand, the PLO commandos executed three of their hostages: American Ambassador Cleo A. Noel Jr., his deputy, George Curtis Moore, and Belgian charge d’affaires Guy Eid. In May 1973, during a private dinner with Ceausescu, Arafat excitedly bragged about his Khartoum operation. “Be careful,” Ion Gheorghe Maurer, a Western-educated lawyer who had just retired as Romanian prime minister, told him. “No matter how high up you are, you can still be convicted for killing and stealing.”

“Who, me? I never had anything to do with that operation,” Arafat said, winking mischievously.

And doesn’t Mumbai look like the Munich thing? The fact that the training was spetznatz is ignored…

Russia controlled Romania, but who got the blame and the end? Russia controls Chavez, Cuba, and Iran… but who is going to get the blame? Russia and China are working together, but who gets the blame?

Its really hard to talk about the middle east stuff, because everyone has only this simplified version of the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s to watch and pick sides over. Since no one knows the reasons behind things is the agencies playing games and little else. and do note that the socialists are willing to hurt their own material to achieve ends. (so destituting Americans and such is just the hard knocks that cant be avoided)

The press is so far communist that reading it is like old Pravda… so they are for the destruction of Israel or its religions capitulation… (a seat of power that through the centuries has outlived the seats of power that have tried to remove it rather than exist with it).

The teachers too… as well as the bureaucrats.

So any argument which doesn’t include these other things is just a game for public consumption. to set us at odds against each other (Hegel) to move us to the new position (socialism).

i didn’t make this stuff up… i didn’t learn this first in books… i didn’t glean it from watching and forming an opinion and epiphany..

I had it explained to me by people who were part of it till they left for a new land where they didn’t have to be… it was explained in principals easy to understand… how else could useful idiots execute it? ever think that to a 100 iq a 70 is retarded.. and to a 120 a 100 is retarded… and to a 165-175… what do people look like? Well unless your like me, who doesn’t look at people like that even though I am in those top ranks, you get a nice society. but when these people annoy you, and you want to control them, and you feel superior to them. then maybe you will side with the despots… no?

The problem isn’t the ease of understanding. The problem is that the audacity to grab everything and own it, and deny anything to everyone else, is so grand, no one can conceive of anyone being able to work it.

But look at it this way.

Our west point produces how many people as output? how many countries.. whats the total for the past 100 years? There are many kgb schools that have been in operation for how long? and copies in many other states.

USSR KGB Higher School / This school was founded by the OGPU in 1930
KGB Higher Intelligence School. The school likely trained intelligence personnel from the 1st Chief Directorate exclusively
KGB Institute of Foreign Languages. This school was in or near Leningrad and trained personnel primarily for the 1st and 8th directorates

If anyone is interested i can point you to sites in which they collect the schools badges that are issued graduates. They are real. They do exist.. And they are not limited by the moral arguments that we limit our actions by. Morals are not real, and pragmatism demands that such are abandoned as weakness. no?

There are a lot of these. The Soviet Union was a military dictatorship. So how many were trained, released, and sent out to do the jobs that they are still doing today!!!! See fas.org federation of American scientists.

West point has 1200 enter per year (give or take)
harvard does 18,000 a year… (They started the first year with only 9)

ok.. so say each agency trained 2000 people. There are more than 10 of them… (since there is at least one in each country)…

That would be 20,000 a year for 50 years… (since say 1950)

1 million people… even if only 10% were let loose in the US…how much damage could they do? since they are funded by Americans, and others who came before them, they don’t need Russian money… (the cpusa was a front whose work was coordinated thru the commentern. Once the borders were more open, commintern was not needed, so they acquiesced to its removal from public)

How much damage?
well, they managed to pull the 1960s revolution! and put in lenins ideas as normal
sex education, free love, no fault divorce, abortion, progressive tax, the taking over of the democratic party till the cpusa abandoned running since the platforms were now the same, and tons more. they stole the hbomb secrets… they put a spy as head of our federal reserve… they put operatives that bella dodd now says head the catholic church in the US (so next time you think of pedophiles in the curch, remember that dodd said her people are watching out for such — such is the destruction game for religion). They bought houses for blacks in the south, and blew them up. they linched blacks… the head of sears a sympathizer and communist funded the syphilis study that is used to lambaste the US (the US government didn’t, as we assume!), they planted bombs in ny and blamed the jewish defense league… they made the world and Americans think that American invented the aids virus…they trained rosa parks and martin luthor king at the seditious highlander school. and on and on…

the US people are the same.. but thats what happens when you invert.

rabbit: its duck season
duck: its rabbit season
rabbit: its duck season
duck:its rabbit season
rabbit: its rabbit season
duck:its duck season

BLAM…

duh
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 4:56 pm said:

A Inconvenient Man Dies in Russia
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/01/a_inconvenient_man_dies_in_rus.html

The attorney, well-known in Russia for representing interests unpopular within the Kremlin walls, including those of murdered journalist and strident Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya, then left the press conference and walked outside to his waiting vehicle. With him went a young journalism student named Anastasia Barburova, a stringer for Politkovskaya’s newspaper Novaya Gazeta, the leading voice of Kremlin criticism in the nation. Barburova had been covering the Budanov trial for the paper for some time.

Markelov never made it to his car. At around 2 pm Moscow time an assailant approached him from behind, pointed a silenced pistol at the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Markelov died instantly, and the assailant attempted to flee. Barburova, heedless of her own safety, charged after the killer and was shot in the head for her trouble. She died in the emergency room several hours later.

Horrifying though the killings were, they could not come as much of a surprise to anyone who follows current events in Russia. Indeed, for us the surprise came in the fact that they did not occur sooner.

In November 1998, for instance, just two months after Putin took over the KGB (by then renamed “FSB”), Galina Starovoitova was gunned down at her apartment block under nearly identical circumstances. Starovoitova, a prominent member of the Russian parliament at the time, was perhaps the staunchest human rights advocate Russia has ever produced.

and our president and he share the same ideology and share the same friends in sympathy…

this isnt from 1930… this is 2007…

like this…
Can You Spot the Chinese Nuclear Sub?
discovermagazine.com/2008/aug/21-can-you-spot-the-chinese-nuclear-sub

Chinese nuclear submarines prompt ‘new Cold War’ warning
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/uselection2008/1920917/Chinese-nuclear-submarines-prompt-‘new-Cold-War’-warning.html

this is all one big conflict… socialism vs capitalism..

and its a death match… only one will remain standing.. and i will say that freedom is not looking good…

hey. before we accepted socialism exterminating 50 million plus americans would be unthinkable. well we adopted the same politics, and we exterminated 50 million americans before they were born… waiting after was a lot more messy and people protested… doing it the soft way, its like twilight zone episode “to serve man”

Chinese defence expenditure is estimated by the Pentagon to be $50 billion (£25 billion) but analysts believe large chunks of the budget are “squirreled away” and it could be as high as $200 billion making it the second largest in the world after America.

and them shipping poisons to our children were just nothing… (even though those things dotn normally get anywhere near the materials for most things).

The PLA is developing a strategy called the “sea denial campaign” which would prevent America intervening in any conflict with Taiwan, Mr Brown said.

It entails asymmetric conflict in which China would use cyber warfare and laser energy to wipe out communications. Anti-satellite missiles, potentially launched from submarines, would ensure that America was “blind” over the Far East. The Chinese have already proven that they have these capabilities as well as using espionage to remove military technology from the US.

”This is what they call pressure point warfare in which they remove any US response in one fell swoop,” Mr Brown said. “China wishes to power project well into the Pacific and challenge the dominance of the US Pacific Command.”

study wwii… the germans and russians sent people into countries way before conflict to set them up for trouble… thanks to mitroken we found some of those caches!!!! they actually existed… thanks to nutrino detectors, we found the nuclear weapons too. [the archives show that russia was planning on invading europe in the late 70s since the us was outstripping them. but reagan played a game of ante, which kept them putting it off till they were broke!]

a while back i was called a tin hatter… but i have been pointing out thnigs pretty good. look at my prior statements, isreal pulled out exactly when i said they would. i said that the hamas thing would be false flag, like mumbai… and it was good no one took the bait.

everyone is playing their roles for public consumption… as before… but the actual game is going on as before…

not one person has been able to show me that things have actually changed from 70 years ago… that there is a real and meaningful reason that the things they think are off the table are actually off the table….
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 4:57 pm said:

for those wishing to look, go to google satelite

For other chinese submarine sites, check these locations:

* Lushun Naval Base (38°47â€²50.78â€³N, 121°14â€²38.72â€³E)
* Bohai (Huludao) Shipyard (40°43â€²5.04â€³N, 120°59â€²45.69â€³E)
* Qingdao Naval Shipyard (36° 4â€²25.36â€³N, 120°18â€²21.47â€³E)
* Qingdao Naval Base (36° 5â€²44.19â€³N, 120°18â€²47.24â€³E)
* Zhenhai Naval Base (29°53â€²53.12â€³N, 121°57â€²55.87â€³E)
* Xizhou Naval Base (29°32â€²8.64â€³N, 121°46â€²13.22â€³E)

The naval base on the southern tip of Hainan Peninsula ( 18°12â€²30.06â€³N, 109°40â€²48.62â€³E) does not show submarines yet, but has interesting features including a large sea-entrance into an underground facility. A Han-class SSN has been photographed at the base in the past. HK
Cappy on January 22, 2009 at 5:00 pm said:

Paging Mitsu. It is personal, and it’s all your fault. These terrorists should live with you. And I do mean it personally.
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 5:10 pm said:

Dialectical Materialism
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/d/i.htm

Dialectical Materialism is a way of understanding reality; whether thoughts, emotions, or the material world. Simply stated, this methodology is the combination of Dialectics and Materialism. The materialist dialectic is the theoretical foundation of Marxism (while being communist is the practice of Marxism).

which is why only the west makes a false distinction between socialism and communism, they are synonyms… and just as we can rename eugenics by the person who started the eugenics movemetn and called their program the negro project before it became planned parenthood, and 50 million were exterminated. other synonyms which allow people to join and yet not think they are a prt of the same thing, are progressive, transnational socialist, social democrat, pragmatist, scientific socialsm, materialist, and so many more i can label them.

Dictatorship

Dictatorship means the imposition of a rule on others who do not consent to it. Sometimes ‘dictatorship’ is wrongly used in contrast to ‘democracy’, but ‘democracy’ implies the imposition of the will of a majority, i.e., a dictatorship, on a minority.

The word originates from the dictatura of the ancient Roman Republic, an important institution that lasted for over three centuries. The Dictatura provided for an emergency exercise of power by a trusted citizen for temporary and limited purposes, for six months at the most. Its aim was to preserve the republican status quo, and in the event of a foreign attack or internal subversion of the constitution. Dictatura, thus had much the same meaning as “state of emergency” has today. Julius Caesar gave the dictatura a “bad name” by declaring himself dictator for life.

Right into the nineteenth century, ‘dictatorship’ was used in the sense of the management of power in a state of emergency, outside of the norms of legality, sometimes, but not always, implying one-man rule, and sometimes in reference to the dominance of an elected government over traditional figures of authority.

The French Revolution was frequently referred to by friends and foes alike as a dictatorship. Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of Equals” advocated a dictatorship exercised by a group of revolutionaries, having the task of defending the revolution against the reactionary peasants, and educating the masses up to the eventual level of a democracy, a transitional period of presumably many decades. It was this notion of ‘dictatorship’ that was in the minds of Auguste Blanqui and his followers who actively advocated communist ideas in the 1830s and ’40s.

In general political discourse in the nineteenth century, however, it was quite routine to describe, for example, the British Parliament as a ‘dictatorship’. Given that in most countries the franchise was restricted to property-owners, this usage was quite appropriate, but it was also used to attack proposals for universal suffrage, which, it was held, would institute a dictatorship over the property owners.

Modern usage of the term begins to appear in connection with the Revolutions which swept Europe in 1848. The Left, including its most moderate elements, talked of a dictatorship, by which they meant nothing more than imposing the will of an majority-elected government over a minority of counter-revolutionaries. Terrified by the uprising of the Parisian workers in June 1848, the Provisional Government handed over absolute power to the dictatorship of General Cavaignac, who used his powers to massacre the workers of Paris. Subsequently, a state-of-siege provision was inserted into the French Constitution to provide for such exigencies, and this law became the model for other nations who wrote such emergency provisions into their constitutions. From the middle of the nineteenth century, the word ‘dictatorship’ was associated with this institution, still more or less faithful to the original Roman meaning – an extra-legal institution for the defence of the constitution.

It was only gradually, during the 1880s, that ‘dictatorship’ came to be routinely used to mean a form of government in contrast to ‘democracy’ and by the 1890s was generally used in that way. Prior to that time, throughout the life-time of Karl Marx for example, it was never associated with any particular form of government, everyone understanding that popular suffrage was as much an instrument of dictatorship as martial law.

how quaint
Bogey Man on January 22, 2009 at 5:21 pm said:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The essential beauty of the American ideal of freedom is that it is the birthright of all men.

It is not a priviledge, let alone a nicety, bestowed upon those deemed worthy. It belongs just as much to bin Laden’s chauffeur as it does to Ariel Sharon or Dalton Trumbo.

Jurisprudence is a cornerstone of American freedom. It is so not because we have legislated it to be so or because we, as a people, have decided that our citizens are worthy of it by way of status or position, but because we embrace it as a principle.

It is this, more than anything, that is at the core of America’s contribution to civilization.
Dan on January 22, 2009 at 5:27 pm said:

I have the feeling that for the next 100 days we are going to subjected to numerous stories in the AP,NYT,WaPo,Reuters, etc with the theme of how Obama is changing the government and the punchline being that the changes are being studied. Managing the news has been a powerful weapon in the hands of Obama, just as it was ineffective for Bush.
expat on January 22, 2009 at 5:48 pm said:

Guantanamo is leading the news here in Germany, but nobody reads the fine print. This whole thing is just a PR stunt to reenforce his Messiah image, and it’s working. The uninformed babble is driving me nuts. It’s worse than Bush’s Mission Accomplished banner because that was raised for folks who had actually accomplished their mission.

For some background on Guantamo and the EU, check out John Rosenthal’s piece at http://www.newmajority.com
Baklava on January 22, 2009 at 6:14 pm said:

Bogey lied again by saying, “It belongs just as much to bin Laden’s chauffeur”

The rights spelled out under our constitution applies not to Bin Laden’s chauffeur.

It does apply to me though ! 🙂

If you are a citizen of another country and at war with us you are dealt with according to a whole different set of rules – I’m sure you know that Bogey – and since you “knew” it you lied….
Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 6:59 pm said:

The essential beauty of the American ideal of freedom is that it is the birthright of all men…

…who are citizens or residents of the United States.

Fixed that for ya.

Here’s a clue: people in the United States have obligations, such as liability for taxes, as well as rights. Clowns running around in the ‘Stans have neither obligations toward the US, nor rights from it. Try to think a little more incisively, OK?
Bogey Man on January 22, 2009 at 7:20 pm said:

The authors are clear: Rights are “unalienable” and “endowed by the Creator.”

It’s no surprise that you guys don’t understand the most essential point America’s founders were making about their ideals.
Bogey Man on January 22, 2009 at 7:28 pm said:

To put it yet another way, you view human rights as a privilege the government can bestow, or renege, based on its assessment of a person’s status.

The founders viewed human rights as a birthright of all people, and not something the government could either give or take away, and that is exactly why their worldview was transformational.
Lee on January 22, 2009 at 7:47 pm said:

Apparently, Boog boy is cherry-picking, again…
Did you read further? Didn’t think so..

“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their power from the consent of the governed.”

Yep, that’s right, Boogs. Rights may be “endowed by the Creator”, but are secured by “Governments”, not mere assertion.
Don’t you ever get tired of being wrong?
Bogey Man on January 22, 2009 at 8:09 pm said:

No one is suggesting that it is America’s right or responsibility to secure the human rights that the Creator has endowed to Pakistanis or Afghans or Yemenis, for example.

Rather, the point is that those rights exist and cannot be denied by the U.S. government. There is no need for the U.S. to “secure” them, because there is no standing for denying them in the first place.

The founders’ point is that government exists to secure these rights, not to bestow them or, certainly, not to deny them.

Again, it’s no surprise that you don’t understand something so fundamental to the concept of American freedom.
Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 8:35 pm said:

Rather, the point is that those rights exist and cannot be denied by the U.S. government.

Seriously, now, are you being deliberately obtuse?

Killing enemy combatants in war is a legitimate function of the US government, yes? Were each of those enemy combatants apprised of his rights, offered representation, etc.? Did we need to issue a death warrant for every Axis soldier in WWII?

The Constitution guarantees American civil liberties and other rights to Americans.

Is that so hard to understand?

The Constitution is in essence a pact; individuals have come together for the common good, and have set out limits and precepts by which they will be governed. No mention of people in Tierra del Fuego – they’re on their own. To put it in the context of your handle, it’s a deal; the governed are offering their consent to granting certain powers to the government, with provisos limiting what the government can do to them. People who are not a party to the deal are not covered in the deal. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Let me put it this way. If you don’t join Costco, then you can’t whine that you don’t get Costco prices, or exercise other benefits of membership.

Does that help? Sheesh.
huxley on January 22, 2009 at 8:41 pm said:

artfldgr — Three consecutive posts and thirteen screenfuls of your logorrhea.

This is neo’s blog, and the comments are a conversation, not your personal soapbox in the park. Show some consideration.
Baklava on January 22, 2009 at 8:46 pm said:

Wow. He wasn’t lying…… He is very very ignorant of the American constitution.
Baklava on January 22, 2009 at 8:48 pm said:

The rights of Americans do not extend to those who are not American.

Thus, that is why other countries are able to stone their women and have no child labor laws…

Even our own felons are stripped of liberties and rights. Most felons do not have the right to vote.

But to Bogey, he would extend our rights to non-citizens at war with us.

WOW 🙁
Logern on January 22, 2009 at 9:08 pm said:

But the full protection of the laws designed to protect our own civilian citizens, and most especially the very open rules concerning discovery (what the defense is allowed to know in a criminal case), are destructive and dangerous when applied to terrorists.

McVeigh was a successful terrorist and a American. I’m curious how you would modify your above statement.
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 9:15 pm said:

the rights americans have do not come from the american state… they come from above that state which is why the american state cant deny a persons right without reason.

its that last part your all missing, and the first part that the left is playing with (despite the fact its blatant they dont believe it for the majority).

yes these rights come from outside of the state, but the state has the job of protecting that natural self evident thing from those that would threaten it, and in order to protect it from those that threaten that freedom, one has to act and deny them what they seek to deny others.

john stuart mill said (paraphrasing) one should be free to act as one wishes as long as ones actions do not deny someone else their basic rights. (taking valid points to there extreme is a way of breaking them which is what the left has been doing. kind of force feeding our own platitiudes to their most extreme embodyments – while helping us forget key limits and reasons for them).

anyway… its evident that those who seek to deny others their right to life, liberty, their own property and to be safe in their person, etc…

the question is to what level is a persons freedom to enjoy their god given rights is justified by their actions that abrogate said rights for others?

you see when we catch someone that has been attacking others, stealing, etc… betraying the public trust and general welfare, we select rights and deny them knowing that such is a punishment, while other states cant see the difference and thing such denial is ok for standard every day life.

the key is that we believe that such freedom is not aportioned based on class or status, but is for everyone except those who seek to deny it to others, and so we punish them by denying them theirs in different levels depending on what degree they were affecting lives (thats the presumption, whether the punishments make sense is the issue we always argue over).

in another state, or rather most others, power is delegated down (so everyone is not equal even though these states profess that), and rights are also assigned in the hierarchy as well… so those higher up have more rights and can do things to htose below who have less rights or whose rights they dictate in a hand me down heirarchy.. (whats been recently called a piss layer cake where only the one guy on top doesnt get pissed on. the lower you go, the more those above take it out on you, and the more there are that are looking for someone below).

so again.. they are seeking to break things by pushing them past any concept of normal application. we flail around because we find it hard to get to the crux of the argument or the point and how the parts have been juxtaposed to stretch things and so make it harder to locate that crux.

its in this confusion that we make mistakes in interpretation or defintion that changes what shouldnt be changeable…

when the state in america willfully denies people their rights, they do it with a heavy head and they do it in a way leveled at those who are violating such precepts…

the combatants in guantanamo are not being denied all rights, they are being denied SOME rights. the right to freely associate, the right to move around and be safe from examination by the state of waht one has, the right to property, etc… they do not deny them the right to their religious beliefs, their right to speak and be heard and petition the state that their conditions and the states treatment is in violation of its own precepts, etc. most others whould have shot them, or put them to work.

the idea is to break the concept of such open liberty by stretching it to apply where it doesnt apply, and to do so without challenging the core which is unassailable, but to challenge the rim and other issues which are connected but not which the actual argument revolves around. ya know there are books that describe this kind of stuff and how to apply it… a lot of it stems from a world view that flows from the stuff i tried to link to above…

just remember that if you accept the concept that we extend rights to… or that the state grants them or not… then we have just changed without realizing it.

thats the silent part of the argument that is not corrected since we are so loose with our language “ya know what i mean”.

that the argument is being framed not that the state is taking away rights, but that the state chooses who to grant them too, and so there can be different levels of granting all through society… rather than everyone in society has the same rights, except those who violate that freedom!!!

the soviet union was only the width of a chain link fence away… but if you dont understand this little tweak, your missing where the real battle is being lost or won.

by accepting a position in the argument without challenging the false way that the argument is being framed, it matters not which side anyone takes, they all lost and dont know it.
neo-neocon on January 22, 2009 at 9:20 pm said:

Logern: I was thinking of “terrorists who are part of a larger movement,” rather than individual terrorists (or McVeigh, who I believe had one confederate). The problem with discovery with larger terrorist movements is that they give confederates a lot of information about who informed on them, if applicable, and about our intelligence operations in general.

I also make a huge distinction between citizen terrorists such as McVeigh and terrorists who are foreign nationals.
Artfldgr on January 22, 2009 at 9:29 pm said:

i guess the point is that just as people can talk on two levels at once… talking to their people who understand the message, while also talking to the masses who dont get the other message, they can also argue on two levels.

that one can inject acceptance of something that one wouldnt normally accept by couching the argument in a dual way, like i pointed out above.

its a more nuanced form of the “when did you stop beating your wife” kind of thing…

while the people are trying to argue the other points within the false framework, they are building and reinforcing that framework which is then incorporated into their world view.

in this way… we suddenly accept that the state grants rights, rather than takes them away upon others violating the sanctity of that level of freedom and equality.

sorry… can someone recomend a book on putting such broad complex things in short when there is no common pool of knowlege to refer to?

on the other note… January 18, 2009
Virus ‘sends RAF e-mails to Russia’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5537034.ece
and yes, its the guys that scramble to follow their new cold war like stabs at western defenses again… we are refusing to notice the level of increase in the situation… while not connecting the rise of the most left president… etc

ever play that game where you see a picture and you have to guess what it is? and when they pull out to a level that you comfortably exist in, it becomes clear its a flys eye, or a marble, or a fingernail? guess how close we are to the problem, and guess how wide the things moving around together are?
Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 9:42 pm said:

McVeigh was a successful terrorist and a American. I’m curious how you would modify your above statement.

Why should any modification be necessary?

Ayers was a (semi-)successful terrorist and nominally, at least, an American. And yet he got off from the hanging he so richly deserved then (and still does now), owing to government misconduct.

So what’s your point?
grackle on January 22, 2009 at 9:58 pm said:

Although their violent acts break the laws of most nations the world-wide terrorist network is not a criminal organization and should not be seen as a criminal justice problem. The goals and methods of terrorists are vastly different than ordinary criminals.

Bogey and Logern’s pronouncements are structured around the unstated assumption that the terrorists should be given the same rights as any criminal. They are trying to dictate the terms of the debate with a false premise.

Mere criminals cannot threaten the very existence of nations. And I would not use the rules of the treatment of prisoners of war as a model for the treatment of terrorists. No army of any nation claims these vermin as its own. These are not soldiers
FredHjr on January 22, 2009 at 10:00 pm said:

There is something quite unnatural about people in our country who want jihadis put inside the criminal justice system. Are they aware that the rules for the handling of evidence and disclosure of evidence sources and methods can seriously compromise our security?

I fully expect the enemy to strike this country very hard during the next few years. There has been some discussion for months now about the al Q groups in Algeria and bubonic plague. If that happens, look out. We will be facing a catastrophe of gigantic proportions.

Biological and chemical weapons would be the ideal way to strike at us, but I would imagine dirty bombs would also do severe damage.

This one will be on President Obama, but even more than that I will personally hold every American who voted for him in some way responsible for the degradation of our security and our deterrence posture.
Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 10:05 pm said:

Fred, I give Obama a year’s grace. After that, anything that happens is on his tab.
Bogey Man on January 22, 2009 at 10:14 pm said:

“I will personally hold every American who voted for him in some way responsible.”

Wow. Talk about blaming America first! Wouldn’t it be a little more rational to blame the attackers themselves?

It’s telling that in every comment claiming human rights aren’t endowed by the Creator, but by the government and not “unalienable,” the people in question are described as “terrorists.”

We have no way of knowing whether these people are terrorists or charity workers. Innocent until proven guilty is both a cornerstone of our justice system and a reflection of our deepest englightenment values.

And why is it that opponents of unalienable rights insist on the Pollyanna view that jurisprudence should not incur either costs or risks?

Of course there is some risk associated with fair trials for terror suspects. There are risks in every fair trial and we know that, inevitably, some guilty parties will go free, just as some innocents will be convicted.

Freedom is not free. It is saddening that so many here are so willing to spill blood on the battlefield, yet so insistently unwilling to risk any security to stand up for unalienable rights bestowed by the Creator, not by government.
Gray on January 22, 2009 at 10:33 pm said:

Again, it’s no surprise that you don’t understand something so fundamental to the concept of American freedom.

Bogey Man, It’s no surprise that you don’t understand the difference between war and criminal justice.

War is covered under the Law of Land Warfare, not the Criminal Code.

The terrorists are foreign combantants with no army and no recognition under the Geneva Convention. We would be well within the Geneva Conventions to execute them on the battlefield, summarily!

Shooting at US Soldiers does not give an unlawful (under the Geneva Conventions) combatant the rights and privileges of US citizens.
Occam's Beard on January 22, 2009 at 10:33 pm said:

I’m sorry, it’s official: you’re simple.

And why is it that opponents of unalienable [sic] rights insist on the Pollyanna view that jurisprudence should not incur either costs or risks?

What part of inalienable rights for American citizens do you not understand?

The government can and does deport foreigners all the time, but cannot deport American citizens who have committed exactly the same crimes (see, e.g., Luciano vs. Capone). Can you see a small but noticeable distinction here?

Of course our system of jurisprudence entails costs and risks. The question is how much risk, and in what direction? Too easy to convict means too many innocents get rung up. Too hard means too many guilty get a skip. The idea behind our system of jurisprudence is to strike a reasonable – not a perfect – balance the two, to minimize the terror in society. Eliminating it would be great, but in this life, minimizing is the best we can do.

Only a child would think no innocent person ever gets convicted, or even executed. Even though we strive to prevent it, the only way to guarantee that no bad decisions ever get made is…to make no decisions whatever. And that would lead to a much worse result.

The point is that a risk-benefit calculation must be performed. The sainted FDR, for example, essentially directed Francis Biddle (AG at the time) to find a way to fry the German saboteurs who were landed by submarine in NY and Florida during WWII. Consonant with FDR’s orders, the saboteurs were tried – in secret – by a military tribunal (who knew what was expected of them), and, in a foregone conclusion, most executed forthwith. FDR was making a point to the krauts, to protect this country, and those saboteurs picked up the tab.

Bottom line: when you’re in a knife fight in a rainy alley, Marquis of Queensbury rules are nice but irrelevant.
FredHjr on January 22, 2009 at 11:44 pm said:

Bogey, and others.

Have you ever put on the uniform of the U.S. military? What do you know about warfare or understand about it? Nothing I’ve seen of this meme that we have to Mirandize and grant Constitutional protections to Allah’s minions is rooted in reality.

But people like me have lost the argument by virtue of an election.

I’ll be damned I’m going to listen to pap about how these jihadi animals ought to be treated.

If I feel a bit gloomy these days, who wouldn’t be if you think, as I do, that it’s highly probable that you are living in the period of the decline of Western Civilization?
FredHjr on January 22, 2009 at 11:46 pm said:

artfldgr,

What say you to my apprehension that we are living in the period of history that is the decline of Western Civilization?
Baklava on January 22, 2009 at 11:53 pm said:

Bogey, I learned these basic understandings in high school and boot camp in the Navy in 1988.

You simply do not have enough understanding to be speaking.
Gray on January 23, 2009 at 12:22 am said:

What say you to my apprehension that we are living in the period of history that is the decline of Western Civilization?

It’s not an apprehension, it’s a fact. We are entering a ‘secular baroque’ period. In the old sense of the word: overwrought, florid.

We’ll see ornamentation and filigrees on existing systems and economics, but a failure not only to advance, but even replace what is lost.

Example: No ‘follow-on’ to the Concord SST. Supersonic travel is lost, but new airplanes will needlessly run on ‘green’ fuels.

There will be more regulation, but less innovation.

Example: Windows Vista that performs poorly and wastes processing speed and memory, but is RIAA compliant.

In architecture, government buildings will become ostentatious with expensive features of no real value while homes become more austere.

Example: Schools adding needless ‘buzzword’ features such as ‘natural lighting’ and solar panels for decoration while homes shrink.

Or dreams will become smaller and meaner, but burdened with needless and overwrought features.

Example: There is no ‘follow-on’ to the Space Shuttle. We are contracting with the Russians and Chinese to launch our astronauts, but NASA will spend its budget on green alternatives to space travel and costly bio-degradable booster technology.

American cars will be hybrid, but the batteries will crap out after 7yrs and you won’t be able to afford to replace them or pay the cost of disposing of them.

We’ve lost so much in my lifetime, but at least people aren’t allowed to smoke in a bar….
Oblio on January 23, 2009 at 12:42 am said:

I am touched that Bogey seems to want to resurrect the doctrine of Original Intent as he leads us through a sort of Young Person’s Introduction to the Declaration of Independence. If only we could all go there together.

And I see he has learned a new SAT word: “jurisprudence,” which in my dictionary is defined primarily as “the science or philosophy of law”–in short, a method or approach–and secondarily a specific “body of law; course of court decisions.”

Bogey says “Jurisprudence is a cornerstone of American freedom,” and this is “the core of America’s contribution to civilization.” Between these statements there is some additional pompous rhetoric that reads at first as if it had been part of a “Write Your Own Inauguration Speech Kit: Yes You Can!” downloaded from Change.gov, but which on closer inspection is actually gibberish.

The problem is, neither statement is actually true. If he meant that jurisprudence is a guarantor of freedom, well it has not always been true, in the U.S. or anywhere else (cf Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson).

If he means that the action of government is constrained by the law no ruler can set himself above the law, the technical name for that is “republicanism,” and it exists to protect the citizen against state. The Continental Congress was making a republican argument within the context of British Constitutional law that the American colonial policy of the Crown from 1763 to 1776 was unconstitutional and tyrannical.

However, Americans didn’t invent republicanism or jurisprudence or even our jurisprudence around Natural Rights (now rhetorically transmuted into Human Rights, which is not the same thing at all) and not one of them is their–that is to say, our– gift to civilization.

Bogey’s core statement is a gooey nullity sandwiched between cardboard samples of campaign rhetoric. Honestly, we shouldn’t waste time trying to educate someone who doesn’t seem to be capable of understanding what he is talking about.
grackle on January 23, 2009 at 4:02 am said:

Of course there is some risk associated with fair trials for terror suspects. There are risks in every fair trial and we know that, inevitably, some guilty parties will go free, just as some innocents will be convicted.

Oh, yes, A “fair trial.” What the writer means is a trial within the criminal justice system. I don’t consider bestowing the terrorists those rights very “fair,” since it risks either a compromise of national security under the rules of evidence and disclosure and some other judicial safeguard or even the dismissal of the charges.

Sure, it’s inevitable that under the criminal justice system some “guilty parties will go free,” but that only buttresses the argument that treating terrorists like criminals is inappropriate. We simply cannot afford to let any of these people free. They are far more dangerous than any mere criminal.
Bogey Man on January 23, 2009 at 6:03 am said:

Gray writes:
“The terrorists are foreign combantants with no army and no recognition under the Geneva Convention. We would be well within the Geneva Conventions to execute them on the battlefield, summarily!”

We’ve gone through this before on this very blog. Your claim has been debunked before. Did you forget, or are you in denial?

The 1949 Geneva convention says:
1. Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely…. the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
…
(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
….
Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4 [defining legitimate prisoners of war], such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.

You can’t execute a prisoner of war, and you can’t label anyone an unlawful combatant subject to civil judicial proceedings (including execution) without reference to a competent tribunal.
More important, America has never executed prisoners, because to do so would transgress American principles, which are more important than any conventions.

What is it about unchecked government aggression that people like Gray find so appealing? Why is it they so willingly accept a view of the world that gives government the power to withhold rights our Declaration of Independence says are unalienable and endowed by our Creator?

OB writes: “The government can and does deport foreigners all the time, but cannot deport American citizens who have committed exactly the same crimes (see, e.g., Luciano vs. Capone). ”

No. The government cannot deport anyone without a hearing at which the suspect has an opportunity to defend himself. Of course foreigners can be deported if they fail to live up to the rules regarding their residence, but the government has to prove they have broken those rules. And they have to do so fairly.

More important, we are not debating whether a single court system can accommodate all types of trials and hearings. We are discussing whether it is OK for a government to detain people without trial, without representation and without report to the public, i.e. without jurisprudence.

We are also debating whether human rights belong to everyone, or belong only to those people deemed worthy of them by the government.

Oblio writes:
“Americans didn’t invent republicanism or jurisprudence.”

No one is suggesting Americans invented them. My claim, rather, is that America has been the biggest, strongest, most consistent beacon for them in a world where virtually every other country has been more willing to cut corners and argue in favor of expedience against those very principles.

Maintaining these principles — especially the core idea that human rights are self-evidently unalienable — is crucial to maintaining American leadership of the world. Those principles strengthen us. Without them, we are weaker and far more vulnerable to challenges from more expedient models that put government at the center of power, rather than the individual.
njcommuter on January 23, 2009 at 8:03 am said:

You can execute a POW who has been convicted of war crimes by a competent tribunal. Unfortunately, the international agreement on what constitutes a war crime is breaking down. But using as human shields the very people you claim to protect is surely a war crime. So is attacking the civilian populace. What’s murkier is the idea of making war when you are not a traditional state. A state has the right to make war because it has a population to make secure. A non-geographical “state” like al Qaeda has no legitimate population to secure, but they claim they do, on the grounds that good Muslims are being contaminated by other people’s ideas. If this claim does not give them the right to make war, then their making war in the first place is a war crime. And, IMO, they should be hanged. Not shot, that is reserved for legitimate soldiers. Hanged. Quickly hanged, with a well-soaped rope and a well-calculated drop, but hanged, cremated, and their ashes relegated to the municipal sewers.

I’m not going to try to take on the whole mess here. I suggest that before you argue further you (echo … echo …) take on Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. You may argue with his conclusions–I disagree with a few–but he organizes the facts and principles in a way that makes a lot of things clear.

Would that SCOTUS thought as clearly ….
Assistant Village Idiot on January 23, 2009 at 8:32 am said:

Artfl, I echo the complaint you are simply going on too long. It’s not your blog. I’m not reading them.

The rights discussion is hingeing on some sliding definitions of the word “rights.” Whether innocently or slyly, bogey is using at least two meanings of the word as if they are equivalent. That Americans believe that all individuals have certain rights endowed by their creator does not mean that they have all rights endowed by their creator. Criminals, enemy combatants, enemy non-combatants – all of these have some rights as human beings. What specific rights they have in specific situations varies, and appropriately so.

Everyone has the right to go out for the basketball team in America. If you are in highschool. If you live in the district. If you have no drug convictions. If. If. If. Rights narrow as the situation narrows. We have a right to liberty, but not all liberties; to pursue happiness, but not in any way we choose.
daveg on January 23, 2009 at 9:45 am said:

If military tribunals are inadequate and unconstitutional for suspect terrorists, why are they sufficient for our fellow citizens that are voluntarily serving us in our military?
E on January 23, 2009 at 9:47 am said:

Oblio, thanks for your post above. Clear, incisive, and funny too.

Bogey Man’s comments are not well-reasoned, illuminating, or practical in any way. He’s a shining product of our current educational system, which is turning out legions of graduates who are taught to emote rather than to reason. I understand that’s his “schtick,” but I find it hard to take seriously anything he posts here.

Assistant Village Idiot, you make good points in a very economical amount of space. Try to cut Artfl a little slack. He’s got a lot to say and needs to say it – no one says you’re obligated to read it. Just keep on skipping, and remain kind to people whose style is idiosyncratic.

The above examples make an interesting point – each of us is forging a reputation here through our writings. We’ve come to expect a certain level of rhetoric and reasoning – and volume, in some cases! – from each user of this blog. “By their works ye shall know them,” etc. And it’s incumbent on each of us to fight fair and act responsibly.

Thanks to one and all!
FredHjr on January 23, 2009 at 10:55 am said:

Re. Bogey’s expression of the idea that he’s o.k. with the possibility that guilty terrorists would be found innocent in a civilian court, I’ve read articles in recent years inside of which was expressed the idea that we should not be fighting the Islamic terrorists. We should just treat jihad as a criminal activity and not get too bent out of shape over terrorism. Consider it the cost of doing business. I kid you not. There are people who actually think that way.
waltj on January 23, 2009 at 11:01 am said:

Bogey, the text to which your original post refers is in the Declaration of Independence, which does not have the force of law. Although it is a wonderful, inspiring document, its purpose was to state our reasons for wanting to separate from Britain, and would have been null and void, except as evidence in the trials of the Founders, had the Revolution failed. The Constitution, on the other establishes the framework for governance and is the highest law of the land. While the Declaration states that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, the 5th Amendment to the Constitution states, with equal clarity, that people may in fact be alienated from those rights after due process of law.

What is due process? The Constitution envisioned only civil or criminal procedures, and does not address the conduct of warfare, except in the most general terms: Congress declares war, and the President serves as commander-in-chief of the military forces. The Constitution is silent on the issue of nonmilitary, non-state actors like AQ waging war against America.

So let’s get down to particulars. Where does that leave a terrorist like KSM? Are you willing to let the admitted, boastful murderer of 3,000 people walk because the Pakistani police didn’t have a search warrant when they raided his hideout? I’m not. Does it matter that he was waterboarded? Not to me it doesn’t. This was not done to wring a confession out of him, but to get leads to ongoing or planned terrorist acts. If it worked, great. If not, it shouldn’t taint the case. There was already plenty of evidence against him for 9/11. You may disagree with me. Fine. But don’t try to say that dealing with extremely dangerous foreign terrorists, who may or may not have broken U.S. laws, captured overseas on the battlefield by the U.S. military, or off the battlefield by foreign police and intelligence services is a cut and dried affair. It isn’t, and that’s what the new Administration is trying to figure out now.
daveg on January 23, 2009 at 11:34 am said:

I give Obama a year’s grace. After that, anything that happens is on his tab.

That’s overly generous. Bush only got eight months.
Gray on January 23, 2009 at 11:39 am said:

What is it about unchecked government aggression that people like Gray find so appealing?

I despise unchecked government aggression: I am a supporter of the 2nd Ammendment as a check on government aggression.

Your Romanticism of the terrorists is showing….
Occam's Beard on January 23, 2009 at 12:49 pm said:

Daveg, I know – I was rounding up, to be liberal (ahem), as it were, in the slack I will cut him.
Artfldgr on January 23, 2009 at 1:41 pm said:

test
Artfldgr on January 23, 2009 at 1:42 pm said:

fredhjr to artfldgr

What say you to my apprehension that we are living in the period of history that is the decline of Western Civilization?

That’s hard to say since every generation thinks they are a part of such, whether they are or not.

Personally i believe that we are at the edge of western cultures destruction. A house can be completely eaten by termites and remain standing till the last breeze blows by… there really is no way to stop or repair it then since the damage has been allowed to go to the core.

For those who want their world to be expanded by the education we lost, i would recommend this piece.

Early 19th Century British “Environmentalism”
[I can’t post the link since the filter is blocking the conversation].

This essay draws from the best-known writings of the era’s three most influential intellectuals for a portrait of an anti-democratic, anti-liberal social movement based in the aristocracy but claiming to represent the masses; a movement permeated with the ideas of over-population theorist T. Mal thus; a movement benefiting from restricting land supply and suffering from advancing agricultural technology; that fought a cultural civil war using literary Romanticism and monkish asceticism; that was militantly protectionist regarding agriculture; that constrained industrial progress and spread fear of catastrophe.
Artfldgr on January 23, 2009 at 1:42 pm said:

So the liberals of today are actually anti lib erals *(they spit on the original first liberals like mills! And favor very il-liberals like Sta lin and Hit ler, but don’t know it, as they are also ignorant of history, like above)

The easiest way to get followers is to join some other loved group, and then change its points and tenets piece by piece by opposing conservation and promoting a false progression. In this way, one can turn a organization around 180 degrees from its roots and all the followers will nto notice if you spin the message, and they don’t examine or compare against the past (which is also revisioned too). a movement that hates conservation of things that are loved, is a movement that has flung open the door and normalized such transformations and power captures.

Read and find out how we are now an aristocracy… or didn’t you notice they appointed people from ruling families who are related? Bush, Cheney, Obama, and others are actually related… so we have changed our state from a free one, to an aristocracy, and the false presentation of do good socialism will return it to full feudal oligarchy with peasants.

[been trying to lay this all out… but i get slammed for it beiing too long. but if i say this stuff, everyone is trying to refute each piece, which prevents them from seeing the whole…]

But the smartest are too stupid to realize it, and they convince those they teach and write for, to follow that same stupid line.

Or haven’t you noticed that the smartest people are all slaves to the powerful people, and never the other way around?

“Intellectual powers are the offspring of labour. But an hereditary aristocracy are deprived of the strongest motives to labour. The greater part of them will, therefore, be defective in those powers.” Mills

and

“…the class which is universally described, as both the most wise, and the most virtuous part of every community, the middle rank, are wholly included in that part of the community which is not the aristocratical.”

if your free now…. that means change means slavery… as the condition is binary, you cant be part slave, and free… anymore than you can be a little bit pregnant.

Read below and see how far they have converted things because we didn’t preserve them hating to do such an awful thing as conserve god, morals, rights, rule of law, etc.

“if the qualification (of property) were raised so high that only a few hundreds possessed (controlled) it, the case would be exactly the same with that of the consignment of the electoral suffrage to an aristocracy.”

So the goal of socialism is to put all the property into the hands of the few to control all property, and then create, but our own knowledge we are no longer taught, a new aristocracy…

any one want to bet that no one will get this who doesnt already… (and so will not understadn how things can get so far as to have a man like weisel close the door on a gas truck and realize the last person in was his wife)

i guess its up to you fred… is a conversion a collapse? is the change a decline or an improvement?

i guess if your the common class, and smart, its going to be a decline and its going to hurt a lot because they are waiting for improvment (which is why they will be killed when they try to reverse what they did in a counter revolution! which the aristocracy will not allow and will exterminate them. since all the moral crap was for us not to stop them who have no such limitations – they suffer for it, but only if we dont do what we are supposed to do and if we dont CONSERVE things).

i have been trying to explain what i learned from old time family… family and associates at festivils that would get drunk and talk about the things they did as commandants, and the orders they were given and the principals they were taugth and how to apply them.

of course, non of that is on the table for the sam reason we dont discuss pink elephants and leprechans… we dnot believe they exist
FredHjr on January 23, 2009 at 2:04 pm said:

Artfldgr,

I’ve often looked upon the nomenklatura of Soviet society as just another form of the old feudal aristocracy, but with a better story to sell to the peasants.

When I was a young man and an aspiring academic Marxist I noted an elitist view among many in the Marxist movement. They looked down on the common people and working, successful middle class people. During the Reagan years, which was when I was on the Left (I was a fellow-traveler from 1977-1987) I noticed how many of the activist types were from generally wealthier families. Those kids just wanted to find another path to power. The middle class kids with good educations and high ideals, like me, got caught up in the academic Left. I know it sounds far fetched, but I am being totally honest when I say this: I never laughed at or made fun of Ronald Reagan. I may have disagreed with him but I did not make fun of the man. The fact that I turned on the Left by ’87, when I was 32 years old, means that the critiques of socialism finally won over my mind. You are only won over if you have a fundamental respect for your opponent.

But a lot of people on the Left then, in my experience, did not respect the arguments from the classical liberals. I think, based on my experience of these people, that many of the socialists thought themselves superior human beings to the rest of the sheeple. When you have that kind of attitude, it is but a short route to the mentality that you should be the natural leaders of humanity. And that is precisely what you find in every socialist country and experiment from the time it began.

The Red Diaper Babies are the worst. And we have one in the White House now. And most of the people have no idea that he was a Red Diaper Baby.
Artfldgr on January 23, 2009 at 2:23 pm said:

And for those who speak for neo, who reminds me when i get too long, why dont you let neo preside over her own blog, rather than speak for her to get your own ends, while projectnig that on to me because you dont get that my conversation IS on topic, just from higher up looking at the big picture.

if neo tells me not to post, i will not post.
if she says i am too long, then i will try to shorten them
if she says go, i will go.

but i will not listen to people pretending to be something they are not, and tell me what or how to speak.

i cant help that the subject matter we are discussing spans 200 years of VERY heady long and complicated things.

if you want short answers on 200 year and more complicated political theories, then become a leftist and run around misusing words, terms, ideas, and being an ignorant jackass.

heck a summary of das capital is 48 pages long.. and a discussion that would cover it even in part would have to cover adam smith, stuart mill, marx, engels, the romanticists, the luddites, orwell, huxley, lenin, stalin, hitler, mao… the american peace movment and the sexual revolution, feminism, black national socialism, gramsci, the long march, and tons and tons of other things..

and not ever get to a description of the history arond those things, the people and the states and such supporting them!

the tin hatters have served a purpose. they ahve poisoned the area of discussion, to protect a flanking move. you know, pop some smoke, and be covered… as no one can see wahts in that areas, whiout automatically not looking or denying anything is there.

just as they cant make the distinction between jews and nazis, they cant make the distinction between crack pots and agitprop, and history and facts.

technically a discussion on these things would go all the way back to aristotle!!!

25 years ago, i could have said things in short… the people i would have been talking to (that were older) had a similar eduation with simialr history… now it depends on when you were born whetehr stalin is a good guy or a bad,… we cant make disticntions..

and the lazyness of those who debate on the left is legendary… they dont want long tracts, but they also dont want to go read a source… they basically just want their masters to say something short so they can get back to servitude, cause they sure arent interested in freedom!!!

here is the shortversion of everything i said above.

wealthy people paid marx to design something and presented it or used it for another erason. the return to power of the aristocracy that was stolen from them by the middle class during the industrial revolition and the diffusion of power to the people who were owned by them.

they have been playing very clever mind games which you can read abotu, but wont… they have to do with reinforcement of ideas outside of the conciouss arguments. (refutation is hard because each time you try to replace the idea you reinforce it by discussing it. so thats why they jump to make the furst pronouncment. we are all blank slates.. now everytime we try to correct that, we reinforce it, so the process take the deaths of those who cant adjust! by the way engels and marx and lenin said that too, which is why the conflegration was renamed the holocasut so we thing is special not general!)

many of is here dont get the differences in the arguments, i tried to lay it out. but the explanation is too long for them!!!

in other wrods, they are innoculated from undertanding since greater understanding beuond a certain point can only come from longer information!!!

but then again… slaves are not to talk or have discussions with their masters. they are not to muse about freedom, politics, control and power.. they are only to be capable of taking in short commands and orders… they are being bred to favor shorter attention spans and such…

the whole idea is that those with longer attention spans, more patience, better planning, an ability to understand longer writing, and more… are the ones that will make slaves of them!!!! (and happy ones that defend their slavery as huxley said!)

want to laugh really hard..

a person named assistant village idiot chooses what to read by sound bites.

Artfl, I echo the complaint you are simply going on too long. It’s not your blog. I’m not reading them.

he is basically saying that either i dumb them down and use common party knowlege or they will punish me by denying me part in their collective.

if you havent read them, then how do you know that they are too long?

i agree they are long, and can be much longer given the subject matter and the igorance… but the issue here is TOO long.

its funny, but give someone who is smart, a really short simple piece, and they will act like the stupid in reverse clamoring for smaller easier to understand fare or else retailiation..

remember amadeus? (no i am not a mozart).

remember the too many notes scene and the explanation of it?

and i repeat it for the village idiot

Emperor Joseph II: My dear young man, don’t take it too hard. Your work is ingenious. It’s quality work. And there are simply too many notes, that’s all. Just cut a few and it will be perfect.

Mozart: Which few did you have in mind, Majesty?

the problem was that the king was an idiot, not that the writing was bad, erroneous, etc.

the king, like an idiot, had the attention span of a gnat… which is why they gauge what they will partake in by the length of their attention spans… or esle they get bored if not entertained.

there hedonism has reached such a point where they cant read or partake of something serous unless its been made a farce, is enjoyable, and is short… so they can run to the next slot in the candy coutner and try that one too, till they are just sick and full of nihilism.

sigh.

neo… in the words of the kinks

should i stay or should i go?

i have fred asking deep questions in which whole volumes have been written (the decline of civilizations), and another set who hates that i am long.

[sarcasm] can we talk about nekkos again? puppies and stuff… and stay away from things to hard for the younger ones to handle with their superior abilities and education [/sarcasm]

Salieri: Leave me alone.
Father Vogler: I cannot leave alone a soul in pain.
Salieri: Do you know who I am?
Father Vogler: It makes no difference. All men are equal in God’s eyes.
Salieri: [leans in mockingly] *Are* they?
FredHjr on January 23, 2009 at 3:20 pm said:

Artfldgr,

For me, Western Civilization is an incredibly complex work that has eclectically and also seamlessly borrowed the excellence and the virtues of Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the Enlightenment. The High Middle Ages and the Renaissance also made important contributions. In its totality it is a meritocracy and a liberation of humanity that has resulted in ever greater learning and material prosperity and health for most of the people who live under it. It is not an unblemished history. Yet in its totality it gleams with advancement when juxtaposed against civilizations which enslave humanity.

I think the beginning of the end of our civilization began with the French Revolution and The Terror. It was the beginning of the elaboration of totalitarian thought and throughout the 19th century this kept on finding newer permutations of elegant, intellectual terror. The 20th century was the culmination of the barbarity of totalitarianism.

Islam, to me, is a separate civilization and ideology of enslavement. Once they were stopped at Poitiers and later at Vienna, we were safe from its predations, and Islam began to collapse into a miasma of ever greater corruption and backwardness. Prior to that point, whatever prosperity it did have was the result of plundering non-Muslims of their property, wealth, and intellectual powers.

Now, with the latter part of the 20th century behind us and the dawn of a new millenium, the totalitarians in both civilizations have mated and allied, creating a very large and powerful force. We are only now just beginning to grasp the enormity of what this is and what it is accomplishing. This combined Beast is relentless in its pursuit to destroy our legacy and put us all under their boots. Also, you can be sure that these two erstwhile allies will fight each other in the future for dominance. To me, Moscow is the epicenter now of the totalitarian forces and alliances within our civilization. In Islam, it is Tehran that is the center of their power. Right now, Moscow and Tehran are allied against the West.

I almost want to say that they have won this war already, because the West is caught at a moment when most of its people do not even know about the existence of this combined Beast, much less have the will to fight it. They are ahead of us. Way ahead across many dimensions. What most helps their cause is the willful self-loathing of our people for their own civilization and heritage. It is very difficult to win this struggle when you have this enervating, entropic force that is like a millstone around the neck.
grackle on January 23, 2009 at 4:21 pm said:

The 1949 Geneva convention says:

BLAH, blah and more blah. I suggest that the writer peruse the words from the blog linked below. The blog-writer is an internationally recognized authority on legal matters, a lawyer and once clerked for a SCOTUS member. He finds that Bush has broken no laws in regards to the detainees and that the detainees have been afforded ALL the safeguards of which they were entitled under the Geneva Conventions. Here’s just one quote from the blog:

But as best I can tell, it is not correct to say that the Administration is violating the text of the Geneva Conventions (and it is the text that the U.S. has ratified) by failing to give the detainees a hearing on whether they are indeed civilians who should be released. The text of the Conventions does not require any such hearings.

http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_07_00.shtml#1088792683
Logern on January 23, 2009 at 4:37 pm said:

Joke

Question:How do you know if someone belongs in Gitmo for 7 years?

Response: I don’t know?

Answer: Right!

Hah ha.
Bogey Man on January 23, 2009 at 9:08 pm said:

No one is suggesting the terror suspects are entitled to exactly the same trial afforded American citizens in a criminal court.

Nor is anyone saying that the Declaration of Independence sets out the legal framework for such a trial.

Rather, the point is that denial of a fair trial, counsel and other legal protections violates core American principles.

Remember: The Bush administration initially sought to hold the suspects indefinitely, with no trial of any kind, and then, in response to widespread objections, attempted to create special “war tribunals” distinct from military tribunals and lacking many of the fundamental elements of a fair trial.

From Newsweek:
“It’s no coincidence that the most vocal rebels around the president’s wartime excesses have come from the ranks of his own military and legal advisers. Regardless of personal ideology or politics, they have devoted their careers to mastering systems and procedures that are greater than the ends sought by the president. Lawyers balk when laws are broken or interpreted beyond all recognition. And soldiers get queasy when the rules are bent in ways that can hurt other soldiers.

“You can characterize these minirevolts as the far right pushing back against an executive branch that has almost literally lost its mind. Or you can more accurately see it as the professionals ultimately putting their training and principles back into the service of the law or the war, as opposed to the service of this presidency. Bush’s military tribunals, while possessing their own charming “I’ll sew the costumes, you paint the barn” quality, were a mistake from the outset. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that more and more serious professionals are backing away from them. We should merely be amazed that anyone is still prepared to support them at all.”

Two key elements run through the opposition on this blog to American principles of jurisprudence:
1. the suspects aren’t “suspects” they are terrorists. The fact that the military has chosen to detain them is evidence enough of their guilt. A trial would only be necessary to confirm the extent of punishment, since there is no possibility of innocence.
2. Detention and torture or torture-like interrogations function as both punishment and deterrence, rather than as only a way of preventing escape until trial and of gathering evidence.

And, I’m with those who say arty should post as much as he likes. It is really no problem to scroll right past it.

Lastly, I think we can all agree that the ratio of ad hominem to fact and reason is inversely proportional to the weight of one’s arguments. By that measure, my opponents’ here are light as a feather.
Lee on January 25, 2009 at 4:50 pm said:

“Rather, the point is that denial of a fair trial, counsel and other legal protections violates core American principles.”

But not the Geneva Conventions, which you obviously have not read. And it’s the actual law or treaty, not the alleged “principle” which takes precedence. Just read Article VI of the Constitution.

I guess “feathers” have more gravitas than blowing smoke, eh, Boog?
coach booking on March 3, 2011 at 11:41 am said:

Zune and iPod: Most people compare the Zune to the Touch, but after seeing how slim and surprisingly small and light it is, I consider it to be a rather unique hybrid that combines qualities of both the Touch and the Nano. It’s very colorful and lovely OLED screen is slightly smaller than the touch screen, but the player itself feels quite a bit smaller and lighter. It weighs about 2/3 as much, and is noticeably smaller in width and height, while being just a hair thicker.

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The New Neo

A blog about political change, among other things

Obama and the detainees: reversing Bush?

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Obama and the detainees: reversing Bush? — 57 Comments

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