Rush Limbaugh admits Gitmo was a failure

[elfs]

Of course, he didn't really say that Gitmo was a failure. He just said that "one in five" of the people released from the Guantanamo Bay Prison facility had returned to terrorists groups.

Huh. That means that, in violation of all American tradition and sensibility, 80% of the people at Gitmo were, in fact, imprisoned without charge or reason. They were denied access to legal counsel, communications with their families, habeas corpus, or a speedy trial.

These were not "terrorists picked up on the battlefield." That's convenient Bush/Cheney speak for "Brown-skinned men wherever an American soldier happens to be." These were men picked up on the say-so of paid informants, family members with grudges, and warlords looking to settle a score. Many were imprisoned falsely.

And y'know what? Every single case that Limbaugh describes was of a man freed during the Bush-Cheney term, when policy was to deliberately keep the files difficult and possibly non-existent. Not one case of recidivism can be traced to prisoners freed during the current administration.

That's competence for ya. You either have it, or you don't.

Comments

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

Thank you for your advice to educate myself.
I read the full text of the several conventions and their amendments (http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/CONVPRES?OpenView) and still could not find "unlawful enemy combatant" defined anywhere.

CLEARLY, you are basing your argument on other people's opinions about the documents. CLEARLY, you have been blustering and bluffing and hoping that your force of emotion will turn those opinions into facts.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

My error, you are correct that it is not defined in the Geneva Convention. I was remembering section §948a of U.S. code Title 10 that makes that definition:

(1) Unlawful enemy combatant.—
(A) The term “unlawful enemy combatant” means—
(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant; or
(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense.

(2) Lawful enemy combatant.— The term “lawful enemy combatant” means a person who is—
(A) a member of the regular forces of a State party engaged in hostilities against the United States;
(B) a member of a militia, volunteer corps, or organized resistance movement belonging to a State party engaged in such hostilities, which are under responsible command, wear a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance, carry their arms openly, and abide by the law of war; or
(C) a member of a regular armed force who professes allegiance to a government engaged in such hostilities, but not recognized by the United States.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

So it's a term defined solely in U.S. law, which was enacted in 2006 (http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?getdoc+uscview+t09t12+632+0++%28%29%20%20AN)... years after Camp X-Ray was filled with prisoners.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

From a 1942 UNANIMOUS Supreme Court Ruling in re: Ex Parte Quirin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Parte_Quirin):

Unlawful combatants are likewise subject to capture and detention, but in addition they are subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals for acts which render their belligerency unlawful. The spy who secretly and without uniform passes the military lines of a belligerent in time of war, seeking to gather military information and communicate it to the enemy, or an enemy combatant who without uniform comes secretly through the lines for the purpose of waging war by destruction of life or property, are familiar examples of belligerents who are generally deemed not to be entitled to the status of prisoners of war, but to be offenders against the law of war subject to trial and punishment by military tribunals.

Quirin is frequently used as the precedent for prosecuting unlawful enemy combatants under the UMCJ, and not the civil justice system.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

And at the bottom of that very page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_Parte_Quirin), Wikipedia notes that the 1942 Quirin decision was superseded by the U.S. ratification of the Geneva Conventions in 1949, giving Geneva the force of federal law. The American Bar Association issued a report stating that the Quirin decision does not mean we could hold these people incommunicado without recourse to courts or lawyers.

The Supreme Court in 2006 decreed, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamdan_v._Rumsfeld), that the Gitmo detainees were indeed Prisoners of War under Article 3, and that the U.S. was in gross violation of Article 3 for each one of those detainees.

The big picture is that we, as a country, violated these people's rights. We held them without EITHER the protection of U.S. law OR international law, and we had to make a secret prison outside of our borders, and construct new exceptions to the law, in order to practice "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation" -- kidnapping and torture, to us reality-based folk.

[darrelx.livejournal.com]

If I were to cede to the anti-Bush spin of the status of the Gitmo detainees (which I do not), I would still say that we are safer today because of Gitmo, and would hope that future leaders would do exactly the same thing in the same scenario.

[bikerwalla.livejournal.com]

It's a decision by the highest court in the land. Prisoners of War, Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. Call that "spin" if you want.

I would hope that future leaders react with horror to the idea of imprisoning people without due process, and that someday we will look upon this with as much shame as we now look upon the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, Supreme Court decisions are "anti-Bush spin" now?

I don't think anybody is arguing that there is not a legal definition called "Unlawful Enemy Combatant," and that many, if not most, of the Gitmo detainees meet the criteria.

What people object to are the following:

1. That a detainee's status as an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" means he is afforded no protections under the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. Constitution, or any other applicable treaties or laws. References to case law have been provided to you demonstrating that this is not the case.

2. That all the detainees at Gitmo are "CLEARLY" unlawful combatants. The status of the detainees is a complicated issue, but just take a look at all the legal challenges, investigations, and allegations, and I think it's pretty damn crazy to pronounce they're "CLEARLY" anything. There's a lot of shit to sort through, here.

Also, I can't speak for anybody else, but I find the notion that the only yardstick for success is "being safer" to be completely disgusting. People who would casually toss aside individual civil liberties, the rule of law, and hell, basic human decency in order to feel safer are goddamned cowards. Why are so few people willing to stand up and say yes, those things are worth preserving, even if it's hard and expensive and dangerous?

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