Federal Judge upholds new terror law

[YASNY]

Little testy for you?

 

As for this decision, this goes against the Constitution and our freedom, something the terrorists HATE about America.

 

Therefore if you support this decision, you're kissing the terrorists' asses.

 

Using this narrow logic makes so much sense!

 

No ... I don't give a rat's ass what you think about my viewpoints. It means nothing to me.

[southsider2k5]

 

"hugs not Jihad". Nice.

 

I should TM is and sell T-shirts.

[Balta1701]

The Associated press has made an effort to track down the people who were released from Gitmo after being held there for sometimes several years, people who the executive branch called "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth". Over 80% were simply set completely free by their home countries.

 

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed, or whether some of America's staunchest allies have set terrorists and militants free.

 

The United States does not systematically track what happens to detainees once they leave Guantanamo, the U.S. State Department says. Defense lawyers and human rights groups say they know of no centralized database, although one group is attempting to compile one.

 

When the Pentagon announces a detainee has been moved from Guantanamo, it gives his nationality but not his name, making it difficult to track the roughly 360 men released since the detention center opened in January 2002. The Pentagon says detainees have been sent to 26 countries.

 

Four-fifths freed after transfer

But through interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo. The investigation, which spanned 17 countries, found:

 

* Once the detainees arrived in other countries, 205 of the 245 were either freed without being charged or were cleared of charges related to their detention at Guantanamo. Forty either stand charged with crimes or continue to be detained.

* Only a tiny fraction of transferred detainees have been put on trial. The AP identified 14 trials, in which eight men were acquitted and six are awaiting verdicts. Two of the cases involving acquittals — one in Kuwait, one in Spain — initially resulted in convictions that were overturned on appeal.

* The Afghan government has freed every one of the more than 83 Afghans sent home. Lawmaker Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the head of Afghanistan's reconciliation commission, said many were innocent and wound up at Guantanamo because of tribal or personal rivalries.

* At least 67 of 70 repatriated Pakistanis are free after spending a year in Adiala Jail. A senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official said investigators determined that most had been "sold" for bounties to U.S. forces by Afghan warlords who invented links between the men and al-Qaida. "We consider them innocent," said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

* All 29 detainees who were repatriated to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark, Bahrain and the Maldives were freed, some within hours after being sent home for "continued detention."

 

Some former detainees say they never intended to harm the United States and are bitter.

 

"I can't wash the three long years of pain, trouble and humiliation from my memory," said Badarzaman Badar, an Afghan who was freed in Pakistan. "It is like a cancer in my mind that makes me disturbed every time I think of those terrible days."

[Texsox]

There you go again trying to apply the Constitution to FOREGINERS. That is NON-CITIZENS, PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT AMERICANS!!!!

 

 

Do you think people dont notice when you make insane statements like that?

 

Nuke, when a foreign national commits a crime on US soil, they do receive all the rights of a US citizen. They receive a a fair trial, They are allowed an attorney, we basically have always had one set of rules for anyone in our courts. Just as Americans who are held in foreign jails are usually treated like citizens of that country not of the US. So while all your caps and outrage is kind of funny, it isn't really a factor.

 

It is outrageous that we either arrested non-military people and are charging then with crimes committed on foreign soil and want to try them in military courts. Or we captured enemy soldiers and don't want to give them the Geneva protection we agreed to.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Nuke, when a foreign national commits a crime on US soil, they do receive all the rights of a US citizen. They receive a a fair trial, They are allowed an attorney, we basically have always had one set of rules for anyone in our courts. Just as Americans who are held in foreign jails are usually treated like citizens of that country not of the US. So while all your caps and outrage is kind of funny, it isn't really a factor.

 

It is outrageous that we either arrested non-military people and are charging then with crimes committed on foreign soil and want to try them in military courts. Or we captured enemy soldiers and don't want to give them the Geneva protection we agreed to.

 

 

When you find a passage in the Geneva Convention that applies to terrorists and others who are not part of a standing army or an arm of a legitimate government then let me know.

[Texsox]

There you go again trying to apply the Constitution to FOREGINERS. That is NON-CITIZENS, PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT AMERICANS!!!!

 

 

Do you think people dont notice when you make insane statements like that?

 

 

Do you think people don't notice when you make insane statements like that?

 

 

 

When you find a passage in the Geneva Convention that applies to terrorists and others who are not part of a standing army or an arm of a legitimate government then let me know.

 

 

 

I've already said, they don't fit in either. But if we are going to try them in a military court, then we've started calling them military, and should go all the way. That is the most noble thing to do. As the world's moral authority and bastion of human rights we should be showing the world the American ideal. We should not be acting like the third world despots we are fighting. IIRC we are fighting in Iraq because a dictator tortured people and held them without basic human rights. We need to do one or the other, but doing neither makes us look like the biggest hypocrites in the world.

[Balta1701]

Not sure whether this one belongs here or not, but it's sorta on topic. Long piece from the NYTimes.

 

One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United States military’s maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.

 

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

 

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

 

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

 

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

 

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

 

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

 

“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”

 

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

 

The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

 

“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”

 

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment.

Much more at the article. Oh, and does anyone realize the absurdity of the Pentagon saying in their defense that the people didn't complain about their treatment when they were locked in Solitary confinement?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Not sure whether this one belongs here or not, but it's sorta on topic. Long piece from the NYTimes.

 

Much more at the article. Oh, and does anyone realize the absurdity of the Pentagon saying in their defense that the people didn't complain about their treatment when they were locked in Solitary confinement?

 

 

 

[kapkomet]

Not sure whether this one belongs here or not, but it's sorta on topic. Long piece from the NYTimes.

 

Much more at the article. Oh, and does anyone realize the absurdity of the Pentagon saying in their defense that the people didn't complain about their treatment when they were locked in Solitary confinement?

Oh, does anyone realize the constant defense of these people, who IMO gave up their rights when they started hanging around people (or are those people) who want to blow us all up, is absurd?

[Balta1701]

Oh, does anyone realize the constant defense of these people, who IMO gave up their rights when they started hanging around people (or are those people) who want to blow us all up, is absurd?

Going to Iraq as a security contractor = giving up all your rights and working with terrorists?

[NorthSideSox72]

Oh, does anyone realize the constant defense of these people, who IMO gave up their rights when they started hanging around people (or are those people) who want to blow us all up, is absurd?

did you actually read the article?

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Going to Iraq as a security contractor = giving up all your rights and working with terrorists?

 

 

My question is how hard is it for a guy to identify himself as a contractor and produce ID to avoid that whole mess?

[kapkomet]

did you actually read the article?

No.

 

 

 

My question is how hard is it for a guy to identify himself as a contractor and produce ID to avoid that whole mess?

Good question, Nuke.

[NorthSideSox72]

My question is how hard is it for a guy to identify himself as a contractor and produce ID to avoid that whole mess?

Sounds easy, right? Except, Nuke, I'm sure you know how some of these things go. For one, if the warrant squad (or whatever the military calls it) wasn't informed that someone on premises was an informant, then they would just take everyone and stick them in a cell until everyone settled down a bit. Second, again if no one informed the military of this (and I am so not surprised that there was a communication breakdown between the FBI and the military), then they would have assumed he was a co-conspirator.

 

The point of the article, to me, is two-fold - to see from an American's perspective what the prisons are like over there, and further, to illustrate how piss-poor the management and inter-agency communication is in Iraq, particularly in the justice apparatus.

[NUKE_CLEVELAND]

Sounds easy, right? Except, Nuke, I'm sure you know how some of these things go. For one, if the warrant squad (or whatever the military calls it) wasn't informed that someone on premises was an informant, then they would just take everyone and stick them in a cell until everyone settled down a bit. Second, again if no one informed the military of this (and I am so not surprised that there was a communication breakdown between the FBI and the military), then they would have assumed he was a co-conspirator.

 

The point of the article, to me, is two-fold - to see from an American's perspective what the prisons are like over there, and further, to illustrate how piss-poor the management and inter-agency communication is in Iraq, particularly in the justice apparatus.

 

 

If this guy was who he says he was then it should have been a small matter for him to produce ID and have his story corroborated after invoking the name of his contact. This story stinks of bulls*** to me.

[NorthSideSox72]

If this guy was who he says he was then it should have been a small matter for him to produce ID and have his story corroborated after invoking the name of his contact. This story stinks of bulls*** to me.

That thought occurred to me too. But if you read the article, they guy was let go eventually, so indeed they did eventually corroborate his story. They just took their sweet time.

 

And I can't say I'd be surprised it would take a while to figure it out, knowing how poorly the FBO communicates with other branches of government, and also seeing how understaffed and undersupervised those military prisons in Iraq appear to be.

[FlaSoxxJim]

As the world's moral authority and bastion of human rights. . .

 

 

That's rich, Tex.