Freed Gitmo Detainee Rejoins Al-Qaeda, Attacks US

Meadmaker said:
Let me rephrase. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that every single thing you have said about the Geneva Conventions is absolutely 100% accurate.

You've still missed the point. Governments shouldn't lock people up without charging them with a crime. The exception occurs when they are combatants in an ongoing conflict, in which case they should be held until the end of the conflict, but treated according to the customs of war as POWs. Well, I won't use that term, because, according to the Bush administration they aren't that, but whatever they are they should be treated the same way we would treat them if they happened to actually be POWs, instead of whatever it is they happen to be. We don't do that because some document says we have to. Those documents exist as they do because they reflect those principles. We should follow those principles, regardless of whether or not there is a document that says we have to.
Click to expand...
Throwing civilians in war zones under the bus in order to treat terrorists like POWs is your principle, not mine.

I prefer to protect the non-combatants, you clearly have different priorities.
 
Last edited:
No, I'm not following how anything I've advocated constitutes, "throwing civilians in war zones under the bus."
 
Meadmaker said:
No, I'm not following how anything I've advocated constitutes, "throwing civilians in war zones under the bus."
Click to expand...
Sure you are. You are willing to grants POW status to combatants who don't have a proper chain of command, disguise themselves as civilians, don't carry arms openly, don't abide by the Laws of Armed Conflict, etc etc.

All the rules designed to protect non-combatants in war zones.
 
WildCat said:
Sure you are. You are willing to grants POW status to combatants who don't have a proper chain of command, disguise themselves as civilians, don't carry arms openly, don't abide by the Laws of Armed Conflict, etc etc.

All the rules designed to protect non-combatants in war zones.
Click to expand...

If they do those things, they are spies or saboteurs, and under the Geneva Convention, you can shoot the bastards after a trial.

I'm ok with that.

ETA: But until you shoot them, you have to treat them humanely.
 
Last edited:
Meadmaker said:
If they do those things, they are spies or saboteurs, and under the Geneva Convention, you can shoot the bastards after a trial.

I'm ok with that.

ETA: But until you shoot them, you have to treat them humanely.
Click to expand...

As far as I know there were no Taliban brought to Gitmo. All Taliban captured were and still are held in Afghanistan and Karzai has released a lot of them and were treated as POWs. What we have in GITMO are Arab fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda hence the classification as "illegal Combatants". The reason for GITMO was to have a central location to hold, interrogate and to try Al Qaeda fighters for specific acts of terror. Many were found to be too low level to be a national security threat and were repatriated to their own countries, some are being held because the home country will not take them back so they are in effect treated as POWs have always been treated in that they are held until hostilities are ended. The rest have been held for trial for specific crimes.

I don't know what you mean by humane treatment but they are well fed, well housed, have good medical care, their religion is respected and they are all given an opportunity to challenge their status as "illegal combatants" before a tribunal blessed by the USSC. Rights NO POW has been afforded in any war in history.
 
Texas said:
As far as I know there were no Taliban brought to Gitmo. ... I don't know what you mean by humane treatment but they are well fed, well housed, have good medical care, their religion is respected and they are all given an opportunity to challenge their status as "illegal combatants" before a tribunal blessed by the USSC. Rights NO POW has been afforded in any war in history.
Click to expand...

One of the things that happened over the last several years is the Bush administration was gradually forced into doing things better. There were court cases like Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and another one last summer where the Supreme Court told them that they couldn't make up the rules as they went along. So, the policies today are really not all that bad. However, the Bush administration had to be dragged kicking and screaming to that point, and had to lose in court before they got there.

Even today, I've read and heard interviews with military defense attorneys appointed for detainees at Gitmo who say that the trials are a sham. It shouldn't be that way in America. But then again, come to think of it, I'm confident it won't be.

As for humane treatment, what I mean is no torture.

ETA: and FWIW, gangularis said it much more succinctly than anything I've been saying.
 
Last edited:
Texas said:
As far as I know there were no Taliban brought to Gitmo. All Taliban captured were and still are held in Afghanistan and Karzai has released a lot of them and were treated as POWs. What we have in GITMO are Arab fighters affiliated with Al Qaeda hence the classification as "illegal Combatants".
Click to expand...

This is actually not true. See post #92. I have only looked at 6 detainees so far and 2 of them are Taliban fighters with no other charges against them.
 
WildCat said:
Sure you are. You are willing to grants POW status to combatants who don't have a proper chain of command, disguise themselves as civilians, don't carry arms openly, don't abide by the Laws of Armed Conflict, etc etc.

All the rules designed to protect non-combatants in war zones.
Click to expand...

So do the Geneva conventions provide any standards of treatment for non-POW prisoners, and if so, does GITMO meet them?
 
gtc said:
Yes.
Click to expand...

Evidence?

As far as I was aware, the organisation that conducted the 9/11 attacks no longer exists in any meaningful sense. It's leaders are mostly dead or in US custody, it's training grounds have been destroyed, and what remains is a scattering of "cells" who call themselves Al Qaeda for the cachet but are in no way part of any international network.
 
Semantics.

Cells operating in multiple countries in touch through a distributed communication system trading members, expertise, guidance, resources and propoganda is an international organisation.
 
Meadmaker said:
And...here they are.

I think people living in Afghanistan and fighting our troops, or those of our allies within the Northern Alliance, sound a lot like one of those two groups.
Click to expand...


If you think this you would be rather substantially mistaken. The Geneva Conventions are quite clear on the matter. One of the major concerns that the world powers had when they created the Laws of Armed Conflict was the expansion of the scope of warfare due to the involvement of third parties to the conflict - note the Napoleonic Wars (the actual first World War) as a prime example.

A key aspect of the Laws of Armed Conflict is limiting the scope of a conflict by prohibiting the involvement of third parties. This includes comprehensive obligations for neutral powers as well as the banning of mercenaries and so forth.

You're right that the laws allow for locals to take up arms spontaneously and be afforded the rights of POWs (that right is actually provided by the Hague Convention, not Geneva) however the key word there is inhabitant. Only legal residents of the country in question can take up arms to defend it. Foreign nationals who enter the country specifically to take part in the conflict are third parties to the conflict, and are prohibited from taking part. They are illegal combatants, and are afforded precisely zero rights under the Geneva Conventions or Hague Conventions.

You'll note that the people held in Guantanamo Bay are not Iraqis or Afghanis. They're foreigners. This is no coincidence.
 
Meadmaker said:
They weren't treated as soldiers. They weren't treated as criminals. They weren't treated as spies or saboteurs. They were a whole, new, category. They were something called "illegal combattants", which was somehow different from "spies and saboteurs", because the Geneva Convention talks about the rights of spies or saboteurs, but that was inconvenient, so they made up some new category and said that no agreements or laws actually applied.
Click to expand...


Do you really expect people to swallow this nonsense? The term is "unlawful combatant" and it has a history in military law pre-dating the Hague or Geneva Conventions. This is not something the Bush administration invented.

In fact, if you had paid attention to military history, you'd know that at the 6th Subsequent Nuremberg Trial (the Hostage Trial) the defendants were found not guilty of war crimes for executing partisans, because the partisans were considered unlawful combatants and therefore subject to an immediate death sentence on capture.

"We are obliged to hold that such guerrillas were francs tireurs who, upon capture, could be subjected to the death penalty. Consequently, no criminal responsibility attaches to the defendant List because of the execution of captured partisans.."
Click to expand...

The Third Geneva Convention amended this position so that francs tireurs who met certain specific requirements could be granted POW status, however the people we're talking about don't meet that criteria so retain the status of "unlawful combatant" and "upon capture, could be subjected to the death penalty".
 
gtc said:
Aren't the rules with POWs and enemy combatants designed to ensure they don't get a chance to reoffend? Meaning that they usually don't get released while the conflict continues.

The problem with this conflict is that while they still believe in militant Islam they will still be able to take part in this conflict. As opposed to a normal conflict that could be resolved militarily or by the agreement of the governments involved.
Click to expand...


It should be pointed out that after WW2 German POWs were not blindly returned to Germany without a second thought. Any given POW had to first be sufficiently "de-nazified". In the case of German POWs this wasn't an overly extensive task since very few of them were overly keen on Nazism anyway, but for the more die-hard Nazi fans some of them faced quite a long imprisonment before repatriation.

It only makes sense to follow the same standard here, and only return detainees who have been de-Islamified. The problem is of course that pretty much all of the prisoners are Islamists (rather than a tiny fraction) and even the most die hard Nazi was far more likely in 1945 to abandon "the cause" than a Jihadi will. As long as they appear to refuse to relinquish jihad and radical Islam, I have no problem with the USA continuing to hold them.
 
gumboot said:
Foreign nationals who enter the country specifically to take part in the conflict are third parties to the conflict, and are prohibited from taking part. They are illegal combatants, and are afforded precisely zero rights under the Geneva Conventions or Hague Conventions.
Click to expand...

No problem. Very good. Agreed.

And as I've been saying, there are certain things we do, not because some document tells us we have to, but because it's the right thing to do. One of those things is that we don't have secret prisons where people are kept locked up indefinitely with no trials.

Were these people acting as partisans? Blending in with the civilian population and launching secret attacks? If that's the case, I have no problem shooting them.

If that seems a bit harsh, I have no problem keeping them locked up indefinitely, having been convicted of such things.

Were they people who were loyal to the government of Afghanistan (the Taliban) and took up arms against the invaders? I have no problem detaining them until the end of the conflict, and since the last time I checked the Taliban was still operating, that means there is no reason to let them go now. No problem.

Were they people who plotted the murder of Americans prior to the onset of armed conflict? (i.e. 9/11 plotters, etc.) I have no problem putting them on trial and hanging them for murder.

The arrogance of the Bush administration was to say that these people could be held because we say so, and no explanation is necessary. Also, it was ok to torture them as long as we said it wasn't really torture because they really have no rights anyway. Their explanation to the American people was, "You don't need to know what we're doing. Trust us." Eventually, under court order and political pressure they had to stop those policies, but some of us just weren't keen on them in the first place.
 
Meadmaker said:
No problem. Very good. Agreed.

And as I've been saying, there are certain things we do, not because some document tells us we have to, but because it's the right thing to do. One of those things is that we don't have secret prisons where people are kept locked up indefinitely with no trials.

Were these people acting as partisans? Blending in with the civilian population and launching secret attacks? If that's the case, I have no problem shooting them.

If that seems a bit harsh, I have no problem keeping them locked up indefinitely, having been convicted of such things.

Were they people who were loyal to the government of Afghanistan (the Taliban) and took up arms against the invaders? I have no problem detaining them until the end of the conflict, and since the last time I checked the Taliban was still operating, that means there is no reason to let them go now. No problem.

Were they people who plotted the murder of Americans prior to the onset of armed conflict? (i.e. 9/11 plotters, etc.) I have no problem putting them on trial and hanging them for murder.

The arrogance of the Bush administration was to say that these people could be held because we say so, and no explanation is necessary. Also, it was ok to torture them as long as we said it wasn't really torture because they really have no rights anyway. Their explanation to the American people was, "You don't need to know what we're doing. Trust us." Eventually, under court order and political pressure they had to stop those policies, but some of us just weren't keen on them in the first place.
Click to expand...



The problem here is a lot of people are mixing several separate issues together into a big mess, and then using it to paint broad strokes, which is where people like me take issue with the arguments.

There's numerous issues here, which can be broken down as follows:

1) Detainment of people outside the theatre of war
2) Mistreatment of detainees
3) Use of torture
4) Process for prosecuting suspected war criminals
5) Process for prosecuting suspected terrorists

There's over lap between these various issues, but they really have to be treated separately. The people held at Guantanamo Bay represent a variety of different issues, but it's faulty logic to assume all of these issues apply to everyone at Guantanamo Bay. Case in point is torture. The torturing was done at sites in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and various "black sites" we don't know the location of. There was absolutely no torturing done at Guantanamo Bay. Even those who claim they were tortured, like KSM, make it clear that torture stopped when they arrived at Guantanamo.

So let's be clear. Not all detainees at Guantanamo Bay were detained outside the theatre of war. Not all detainees as Guantanamo Bay have been mistreated. Not all detainees at Guantanamo Bay have been tortured. Not all detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being prosecuted for war crimes, and not all detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being prosecuted for terrorism.

I personally think closing Guantanamo Bay is a bad idea, and it reeks of political motivation. Closing the prison is the easy out that earns the new administration a lot of political capital without actually addressing any of the problems. I think ultimately keeping the prison in place, opening it up to the Red Cross, and implementing much deeper systematic changes would be far more beneficial, but less likely to earn Obama kudos with voters.

Closing the prison is a political cop-out, plain and simple. In reality the issues with the military trials are the only controversy that is in any way related to Guantanamo Bay, and that same issue will exist at whatever base the prisoners are moved to. All of the other major issues occurred elsewhere, and closing Guantanamo won't change anything, except in the eyes of gullible poorly informed voters.
 
gumboot said:
I think ultimately keeping the prison in place, opening it up to the Red Cross, and implementing much deeper systematic changes would be far more beneficial, but less likely to earn Obama kudos with voters.
Click to expand...
The Red Cross actually has an office on site at Gitmo, and has had it there for years.
 
WildCat said:
The Red Cross actually has an office on site at Gitmo, and has had it there for years.
Click to expand...

Yes I know. I was going to say "open it up to the world" along the lines of giving groups like Amnesty International access, but then I realised that was pretty stupid, and really only the ICRC has the right to gain access to such sites in keeping with the laws of armed conflict.

Should really read "maintain access for the Red Cross".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom