Supreme Court rules terrorist suspects have right to civilian courts

[Xavier_Onassis]

Perhaps the Iraqis WOULD HAVE BEEN glad to see Saddam gone, had he not been replaced by violence, civil war and anarchy. It's pretty hard to beieve they think they feel better off when a fifth of the country has been driven out of their homes and several hundred thousand have been killed.

I doubt they enjoy their country overrun by Americans, who can bust down their doors at any time of the day or night dressed like techno-zombies ands yell incomprehensible things in a foreign tongue.

How would you enjoy having Iraqi soldiers bust down your door and hold a gun on you and yell at you in Arabic?

[Plane]

How would you enjoy having Iraqi soldiers bust down your door and hold a gun on you and yell at you in Arabic?



We don't have to wonder , or wait for Iriquis to be ready .









http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2031496/posts

[Plane]

<< Saddam was a dictator . . .>>

NO!!  In the Middle East??  A DICTATOR??  Oh God, whoever could have imagined??   I guess all those years the U.S. government supported him, they must have thought he was bringing democracy to his people.  IMAGINE the surprise and the horror your government must have felt when they realized the man they had supported all those years was really a DICTATOR.  Oh, the SHAME of it all!!




The root cause of terrorism .
===================================
Saddam was hardly the root cause of terrorism in the Middle East.

There isn't one country that has not been a victim or a perpetrator of terrorism there in the last 20 years or so.

Of course not just Saddam , but dictators in general .

Dictators are tha standard form there so much that it becomes a joke to accuse Saddam of it.

But if we cannot change them all to democracys we should not change just two ?

[Plane]

Yeah, basically (minus the sarcasm) I wrote that you can't possibly support (with facts) your allegation that the Iraqis are "largely" thankful that Saddam is no longer in power."  You have no basis in fact at this point in time for saying that.  You made it up out of your own head. 

So a bigger turnout for elections than Americans ever manage does not indicate any enthusiasm?

[sirs]

Perhaps the Iraqis WOULD HAVE BEEN glad to see Saddam gone, had he not been replaced by violence, civil war and anarchy. It's pretty hard to beieve they think they feel better off when a fifth of the country has been driven out of their homes and several hundred thousand have been killed.

What Xo is doing is speculating......which is fine.  Lemme see.... choose between a known scenario of living under a brutal dictator & hope you don't have any daughters that Saddam's sons take a liking to, or take a gamble of having to fight for your freedom, fight for your country's democracy, fight with foreigners who have the same gola with much greater firepower, and perhaps be at more risk for losing your life in the process.  Yea, that's a toughie.  I'd speculate they'd go with the latter....which at this point is as moot as the former.  We're there.  Saddam is out, regime change has been implimented, and Democracy is largely calling the shots vs 1 murderous dictator

[Xavier_Onassis]

Let us suppose you are an Iraqi who has been driven out of his home, or has lost a family member to violence. Or perhaps has had your door busted down at three in the morning by a detachment of Americans who bust your door down and scream at you incomprehensibly about God knows what as they point machine guns at you and your family.

I doubt that you will be filled with  eternal gratitude for having Saddam thrown out.

[Michael Tee]

<<I doubt they enjoy their country overrun by Americans, who can bust down their doors at any time of the day or night dressed like techno-zombies ands yell incomprehensible things in a foreign tongue.

<<How would you enjoy having Iraqi soldiers bust down your door and hold a gun on you and yell at you in Arabic?>>

sirs would be loving it.  "Please may I fellate the barrel of your gun, sir?  I really NEED to express my gratitude for all the "democracy" you have brought us, the arbitrary arrests, the detention without trial, the torture in secret prisons, why it's just like Saddam only with ten times the number of victims and the total destruction of civil society thrown in as a bonus."

Next week is "Thank you for Killing Our Children Week" in Baghdad.  Hundreds of thousands of "largely grateful" Iraqis will ceremoniously dump the charred and dismembered remains of their children at the gates of the Green Zone, where they will be flushed away by street-sweeping machinery and a massive street dance will then take place centred around a replica Statue of Liberty to symbolize the parents' joy at the gift of "democracy" achieved at the relatively insignificant cost of their own often irksome and annoying offspring, many of whom were actually rumoured to have been Muslims.   (The kids get their chance in the following "Thank You for Killing Our Parents Week," when Dick Cheney will appear - - on videoscreen only, of course - - to receive the thanks of Iraqi youth.)

[Michael Tee]

<<So a bigger turnout for elections than Americans ever manage does not indicate any enthusiasm?>>

I had no idea the Americans were going to the polls under the guns of a foreign occupation.  That's shocking.

[sirs]

It would seem folks, that Tee & Xo are convinced that living under a dictator, with it's government sposnored rape rooms, illegality to speak bad about its president, & prisons for children that didn't join the Baath party, far superior to the chance of freedom & democracy, citing the hyperbolic examples of breaking into suspected terrorist homes as the so called "norm"

alas, if Saddam only had more Xo's & Tee's in the world, the world would be such a better place.....for dictators

[Michael Tee]

It would seem folks, that Tee & Xo are convinced that living under a dictator, with it's government sposnored rape rooms, illegality to speak bad about its president, & prisons for children that didn't join the Baath party, far superior to the chance of freedom & democracy, citing the hyperbolic examples of breaking into suspected terrorist homes as the so called "norm"

alas, if Saddam only had more Xo's & Tee's in the world, the world would be such a better place.....for dictators

============================================================================

Boy, those rape rooms, if they ever existed, sure get a lot of play from the apologists for U.S. crimes and atrocities, don't they?  Like rape was something completely foreign to the U.S. military and the CIA.   I've got a sense that the average Iraqi was a lot less affected by the alleged rape rooms and all the other unpleasantries associated with Saddam than he or she is by the results of the U.S. invasion, but for some reason, sirs has still got his head stuck in those rape rooms.

You might want to ponder how the rape rooms didn't produce anything near the five million Iraqi refugees that the American invasion and occupation did.

Here's a concept for you to try on sirs:  Saddam bad, American invasion and American-sponsored governments worse.  Radical, huh?

[Universe Prince]

Some more thoughts on this topic (all emphasis in original sources):

http://www.poliblogger.com/?p=13800

This is why claims (made by people like Scott Johnson at Powerline) that we "give al Qaeda more rights than German POW's during World War II" are absurd. First, we did not claim the right to hold German POW's for the the rest of their lives. Second, and more to the point, not everyone in our custody is a member of al Qaeda and therefore it is not unreasonable for detainees to have the right to challenge their captivity. Too many in the administration and too many of their defenders have bought into the poisonous notion that the United States only capture the guilty, which is manifestly not the case. [...] Since it is clearly possible for US forces to have arrested the wrong people, I cannot see how it is an abuse for SCOTUS to decide that those in captivity should have the right to question their detention.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/06/18/yoo-and-boumediene/

1. Yoo: "Under the writ of habeas corpus, Americans (and aliens on our territory) can challenge the legality of their detentions before a federal judge." This is an astonishing statement coming from a former Department of Justice official like John Yoo. I say that because Americans were locked up in military brigs as "enemy combatants." And their attorneys did file habeas corpus petitions in federal court. The Bush administration responded to those petitions by urging the federal courts to immediately throw them out of court! At one point in the litigation, Bush's lawyers told the Supreme Court, "The Commander in Chief ... has authority to seize and detain enemy combatants wherever found, including within the borders of the United States." Brief for United States, Rumsfeld v. Padilla (No. 03-1027), p. 38. Yoo and others now seem to be playing down those previous assertions about the executive's military powers, but the record is there for anyone to check. Bush's lawyers argued that such American prisoners were perfectly free to "challenge" their imprisonment by filing a habeas corpus petition--again, just so long as the courts pronounced such petitions dead on arrival. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 296 F.3d 278, 283 (2002) ("The government [argues that the courts] may not review at all its designation of an American citizen as an enemy combatant--that its determination on this score are the first and final word.").

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/17/yoo/

Yoo, for instance, claims that the Supreme Court in Boumediene allows "an alien who was captured fighting against the U.S. to use our courts to challenge his detention." But huge numbers of detainees in U.S. custody weren't "captured fighting against the U.S." at all. Many were taken from their homes. Others were just snatched off the street while engaged in the most mundane activities. Still others were abducted while in airports or at work. [...] The other deeply misleading claim in Yoo's Op-Ed is even more transparent. He characterizes the Court's decision as "grant[ing] captured al Qaeda terrorists the exact same rights as American citizens to a day in civilian court." What minimally self-respecting law professor would be willing to make this claim with a straight face? The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don't know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really "al Qaeda terrorists" or something else. That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out.

[Plane]

The whole point of the habeas corpus right is that without a meaningful hearing, we don't know if the individuals our Government is imprisoning are really "al Qaeda terrorists" or something else. That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out.

After the habeas corpus hearing, what do we know?

[Universe Prince]

After the habeas corpus hearing, what do we know?

Let's just allow the government to put anyone in jail indefinitely and never charge the person or allow the person to challenge their incarceration. I'll recommend that the government start with you. And after you've been in jail for a while with real charges and no chance to argue your case, maybe then you can tell me what we might learn after a habeas corpus hearing.

Yes, that was sarcastic. But as the man said, "That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out."

[Plane]

Some more thoughts on this topic (all emphasis in original sources):

http://www.poliblogger.com/?p=13800

First, we did not claim the right to hold German POW's for the the rest of their lives. .

Oh?

What finite period were we going to hold Prisoners of War during WWII?

I think we were claiming the right to hold them as long as it took.

After the habeas corpus hearing, what do we know?

Let's just allow the government to put anyone in jail indefinitely and never charge the person or allow the person to challenge their incarceration. I'll recommend that the government start with you. And after you've been in jail for a while with real charges and no chance to argue your case, maybe then you can tell me what we might learn after a habeas corpus hearing.

Yes, that was sarcastic. But as the man said, "That ought to be too basic even to require pointing out."

There are not as many residents in Guntanimo as there are former residents. When the military has decided that the prisoners were no threat they released them,the ones that are still there seemeither to be threats or if not threats , they are ex-patriots with no home that they can be sent to.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2006/05/06/1632183.htm

[Michael Tee]

<<Oh?

<<What finite period were we going to hold Prisoners of War during WWII?

<<I think we were claiming the right to hold them as long as it took.>>

WWII was a declared war by the Allied Powers against specific nations - - by England and France against Germany; by Italy against England and France; by the U.S.A. and other Allies against Japan.  Since the participants were nations, the end of the war was easily foreseen and the Allies made it easier by declaring that Total Surrender was their goal.  The war would be over when the enemy signed an instrument of total surrender.

The so-called War on Terror is basically a bogus concept - - "terror" is not a defined nation, it is a tactic, which all the participants in the so-called War have used at one time or another, the U.S.A. more than all the other participants combined.  Since it is impossible to make war on a tactic, the  "War" can end any time it is declared ended by the sole aggressor in the "War," the U.S.A.  The U.S. made the "War" and only the U.S. can stop the "War."  Therefore, unlike a real war in which the hostilities will end sooner or later, by armistice or surrender of one side or another, the "War on Terror" has no foreseeable end in sight.

None of the Western Allies envisaged holding their POWs any longer than the end of hostilities, and none envisaged the hostilities enduring indefinitely.  The war ran its course as all knew that it must, and the prisoners were all released except for those of the U.S.S.R., who had to be made to pay for their fascist crimes and atrocities against the peoples of the U.S.S.R.

It's very misleading to claim that the indefinite detention of U.S. prisoners somehow had a precedent in the POWs of WWII.  The confusion claims from one of the more basic lies of the Bush Administration, that it is engaged in a "War" when in fact it is using the term "war" to dress up a series of international crimes and atrocities that have no relation at all to a real war, except with regard to the excessive amounts of violence unleashed against unfortunate civilian populations.