Posted By: Don Hiller  on Monday, June 23, 2008

While I have almost always admired George Wills; and have taken his above comments about the court decision and John McCains' staff inappropriate comment as to the degree of importance of the court's recent ruling as a "OK, George, please drop the other shoe".



Then, this above article coupled the court's decision with CUBA's drilling off out shores!  Ich kann es nicht glauben!



Those are pertinent questions for McCain, who aspires to take the presidential oath to defend the Constitution.



In a previous column, I stated that China, in partnership with Cuba, is drilling for oil 60 miles from the Florida coast. While Cuba has partnered with Chinese companies to drill in the Florida Straits, no Chinese company has been involved in Cuba's oil exploration that close to the United States.

Posted By: American taxpayer  on Monday, June 23, 2008

The Supreme Court is giving rights to the American judiciary system that Americans are losing. When did fanatic beheaders become elegible for American rights of the Constitution?

Posted By: Edward Horvath  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Oh good grief, "American Taxpayer," Habeas Corpus merely holds government to a minimal standard, that it must show some evidence, in a reasonable period of time, that someone being held has committed a crime. If YOUR worst enemy got elected mayor, and sent the police around to toss YOU in jail indefinitely, you (who are presumably innocent) would immediately grasp the value of habeas corpus, the requirement that he make his case before a (presumably impartial) judge.  By the way, he might call that judge who frees you an activist judge or some such silliness, but I think you might still be grateful.



Or maybe not. Maybe if you were arrested and put in jail, you'd conclude - with full consistency - that you were (despite your best recollections) actually a dangerous terrorist after all, and deserved indefinite detention.



The Gitmo detainees may indeed be war criminals. But if there is no evidence in support of that claim, on what basis can you conclude that such a one is a "fanatic beheader?" What about your enemy the mayor?



Are you really confused about the distinction between "accused" and "guilty"?

Posted By: Paul K  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

I am pleased to see George Will show some backbone and point out what many of us have known for a long time - the writ of Habeas corpus was put there precisely because our founders understood that the Executive branch can fall into the trap of thinking they are judge and jury. Habeas corpus is intended to protect anyone thrown into jail (or detention or whatever term is used) so that they can at least know why they are charged and ask a judge to review that they are in fact charged with something.

This assumption that all prisoners must be guilty because they are in prison (or Gitmo) is a scary precedent. I am sorry for "American Taxpayer", in that he/she automatically assumes all residents of Gitmo are guilty simply because they are there. He/she should understand that few were caught doing anything - most were turned in or identified by Northern alliance members. Some are likely guilty; some may have just been at the wrong place at the wrong time; many have probably been held longer than could ever be justified (war time or otherwise). This situation only makes the US look worse in the eyes of many, and that is not the role model we should be. It certainly does not say much for the democracy we are supposed to be trying to export.

Posted By: ThatGayConservative`  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Oh good grief, Edward. Club Gitmo isn't about criminal activities. While it may be for some like KSM etc., most of the 270 detainees are being held after being captured on a battlefield. You may or may not remember, but there was that war in Afghanistan which we're still fighting to an extent.



Geneva holds that POWs and other detainees CAN be held for the duration of the war. This is why they're in Club Gitmo and not because the all supposedly committed a crime. This is nothing more than pandering to the people who believe that, despite history, enemy detainees should be tried. It's pandering to make other countries like us and the SCOTUS decision is nothing more than snubbing it's nose at the Executive and Legislative branches. Above all, this is "President Anthony Kennedy" deciding that he can do a better job than the other branches at running a war.



Habeas does NOT extend to enemy detainees.

Posted By: P.Eischen  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Well, we (the US) have certainly taken a broom and hit a hornet's nest.

Never, will we be as safe as we were on 9/12.  Never!!

Posted By: Glen Scutt  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

George Will is a reminder that, occasionally, Conservatives have something important to say.  Any prisoner of an American government should have the writ of habeas corpus...which is simply a request to an American court to determine whether or not incarceration is appropriate.  Obviously, detained terrorists or prisoners of war should be detained, the latter under more pleasant circumstances as per the Geneva Convention.  But, we need an independent court to review our government's actions to ensure behavior in accordance with our laws.

Posted By: lashaycorbin  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

All I want to know is do OUR, meaning the United States of America's, P.O.W.'s have any rights extended to them when being held in a prison when they were caught during wartime activity?  Or if any regular citizen in any of the countries we are fighting truly have any rights in regard to their freedom.  If you can answer this in the affirmative,then please send me the history book you are reading.  But unfortunately the U.S. thinks it must demonstrate more humanity than the people we are fighting, and this is why we will never truly win a war again.

Posted By: Dauric  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

TGC, they weren't all taken from a battlefield, many were taken from their homes based on information from informants who were given large sums of money for the "Tip". Even the Pentagon admits that many of the detainees have nothing to to with terrorism and were only in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And as far as "Club" GITMO, you should read the declassified FBI report about how the prisoners are treated. The Bush administration has repeatedly thumbed their noses at the Geneva Conventions.

Posted By: David  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Those who don't believe that enemy prisoners should have any rights apparently know little about history.  Treatment of P.O.W.s is not just about the enemy prisoners but about protecting our men and women, should they become prisoners themselves.   We don't need to offer the enemy any more excuses to mistreat our troops.  In America's wars, many of our troops came back from P.O.W. camps alive because of our adherence to the Geneva Convention rules.   Further, enemy combatants are far more willing to surrender if they know that they will be treated fairly.

Posted By: Kevin C.  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

"AmericanTaxpayer", "ThatGayConservative", "lashaycorbin"



When are you folks going to get it.  Becoming a dictatorship, in the name of spreading "democracy", is counterproductive.

The Bush administration, in it's campaign to extend Executive powers and it's refusal to be bound by any U.S. or international laws, is struggling mightily to become a defacto Fascist Dictatorship.

"If you aren't with us, you're against us."  The battle-cry of the Bush conservatives.

Also of Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, and an endless littany of other lesser petty dictators.  Bush has become the petty dictator of the most powerful nation in the world.  Scary.

Sinking to the levels of, and co-opting the tactics of, the very regimes we are working to replace to bring their people our brand of democracy is ludicrous.  We invaded Iraq, for oil and for Bush's personal reasons, under the guise of fighting a terrorist threat that never emanated from there in the first place, so that we could replace a dictator: that imprisoned people at will, without reason, and without recourse; with Bush's vision of democracy that: imprisons people at will, without reason, and without recourse.  Are you starting to see the fallacies inherent in the program?

I know this is a gross oversimplification, and that Saddam had many more strikes against him, but you get the point; I hope.

Nobody thinks that any prisoners, at Gitmo or elsewhere, should be freed if they are guilty of terrorist acts or are actual POWs.  (We don't actually have any POWs at Gitmo, just "enemy combatants", a meaningless term that the administration made up in order to avoid the Geneva Conventions regarding POWs.)  The administration's refusal to allow habeus proceedings to clear any who may be innocent throws doubt onto the detention of all of the prisoners.  At this point, Bush needs everyone detained at Gitmo to be convicted, of anything, to avoid being branded as a war criminal.  So he fights it.



And allow me to pre-emp any suggestions that if I don't like it here I should move to Canada, or wherever.  It is my responsibility, and yours, as a US citizen, and a veteran of the first Gulf War, to work to redirect my country's leaders when I think they have gone astray; when I am not with, but in fact, against them.  This is the way a true democracy works.  If you don't like that, you move.  Find yourself a nice quiet dictatorship somewhere else and settle in.  I hear they're looking for foot soldiers in Columbia and Guatemala, nice tropical climate too.

Posted By: David Morrison  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

George Will says:



The nine justices are of varying quality, but there are not five fools or knaves.



He's right; there are four justices who are "fools or knaves".

Posted By: Dauric  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

"Those who will sacrifice liberty for security will have neither."

            - Benjamin Franklin.

Kevin C. Says it well. We're not fighting a nation, or even a region, we're fighting an ideology and a methodology. Strength of arms will not suffice.

The Cold War was a war between the ideologies of Democratic Capitalism and Autocratic Communism. We won that conflict not through force of arms, indeed the engagements of that period were mixed at best (ie: Korea), losses for the U.S. and allies at worst (ie: Vietnam).

We won the Cold War because as a nation we proved that a Democratic Capitalist system could produce a society that could look after it's own people, treat other nations with respect, foster the creation of efficiency and innovation and with that create more wealth. The military strength of the U.S. is not directly why we won the Cold War, it is however the result of having the winning strategy in a war of ideas. We won the cold war by having better technology not just in our military, but in the lives of everyday people. We won the cold war by having a system where an individual could invent a more efficient process and benefit from his invention, rather than have it and all the rewards for it taken by the government. We won the cold war when the U.S. was sending grain to the U.S.S.R. to prevent their government from collapsing in revolt. (USSR was a known quantity in charge of a nuclear arsenal, an overthrow would create a new government that may not understand or care about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, and Islamic Fundamentalists were just one of the groups waiting in the wings to take over.)

We must prove again that a Secular (or Quasi-Secular) Democratic Capitalist system is better than another system, an Autocratic Theocracy. We do this not by terrorizing those who hold the theocratic ideal as better, they already have terror within their system, they know terror, that's why they use it. We must show a better way of life. We have to prove that it is better to encourage our children to become civil engineers, scientists, farmers, businessmen, etc. than it is to encourage young people to become martyrs. We have to show that it is possible to have a society that respects those with religious ideals, any ideal, without having to be dominated by those ideals. We must prove that tolerance of differing views is no vice, and that it is of benefit to have a pluralism of ideas. We most prove that a society of flexible laws built on the will of the people governed by those laws has greater benefits than a society built on ideas unchanged by time, history, and/or evidence to the contrary (ie: Hacking someone's head off does not serve to validate your ideas to a modern society).

We do not show our way is better by treating others worse than they are accustomed to, that only validates the idea our way is inferior. We do not show the triumph of our ideals by adopting the ideals of the opposition, by adopting their methods we validate their ideas.

We stay true to our values as a society, and our values as individuals. We prove that we are better, our ideas are better, by -being better-.



$0.02

Posted By: Seymore Truth  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

To:  Dauric on Tuesday, June 24, 2008, glad to read a well written synopsis of the real world and not more right-wing pablum.  Only wish some of the others posting here would read something besides John Wayne type comic books as history.

Keep up the good work!!

Posted By: Wolfgang  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

After reading the bleeding heart arguments on this list you political and historical naifs need to be rebutted.



First, the contention that we have to treat the prisoners/detainees/whatever you want to call them with essentially kid gloves to protect our own soldiers is NOT supported by fact or history.  I say this also as a former infantry officer who's been there.  The Geneva Convention protections are meant for thos who are soldiers - not irregulars, guerillas or terrorists - who serve in armies of recognized nation states.  what limited protections are afforded for the other catagory are spelled out in Geneva Four.  Unfortunately a majority of our Supreme Court justices, more interested in currying favor with their contemporaries on the benches of the European courts, chose to ignore this by according them protections under Geneva Three.  The overpaid ivy league law clerks blew it on this.

Further, according kid gloves treatment isn't the guarantee that our troops will be treated with respect.  In WWII we treated Japanese prisoners - what few who surrendered or allowed themselves to be captured - according to the rules.  The Japanese, claiming they weren't signatories to the older Geneva conventions, held that under their code of Bushido, those who surrendered or were captured had no rights.  That explains the Bataan death march, the slave labor of British/American/Dutch/Australian POW's who built the Burma-Thailand railroad or who worked in lead mines in Japan or Manchuria, the beheading of B-29 pilots shot down over Japan or Australian pilots shot down over New Guinea.  In the modern context, are you people forgetting the abuse our captured soldiers have taken from the jihadis in Iraq - tortured, disgigured and beheaded - you need DNA to identify them.  The noble treatment of these people doesn't work.



Second, this whole Gitmo controversey reflects the conceit of the American legal profession - of which I have been a member for 30 years - that EVERYTHING can be resolved in a courtroom.  No it can't.  These are not aging juvenile delinquents stealing hubcaps - these are fanatics who would slit your throat, rape your wife and impale your children without blinking an eyelash and then sing praises to their god for their deeds.  Extending the logic of the Supreme Court majority, the next step is that every person captured on a battlefield is no longer a POW but a defendant in a legal proceeding who should probably immediately be advised of the right to counsel.  Right - Mirandizing POW's who don't even speak the language.  It is bad enough that the rules of engagement have become so concerned with international opinion that legal counsel has to be consulted before a cruise missile can be fired at a target (remember the delay in getting the lawyer when Bin Laden was being viewed from the spy satellite?).  This is a war - not a juvenile gang sweep.  If military commisions were good enough for the German saboteurs who landed by U-boat to engage in sabotage missions during WWII, they certainly are good enough for the current crop of thugs.



The only way to deal with a terrorist mindset is the way the Roman legions did two millenia ago - complete and total annihilation.  Rome never had a terrorist problem.



As for the issue of "torture" - if being feed special diets, being given individual copies of the Koran and being showed which direction is Mecca is what these people are receiving - then it is far, far better that any treatment any American POW received in any war.  "Waterboarding" torture?  Fraternity hazing rituals are more demeaning and dangerous.  You want real torture - what the Gestapo and NKVD did was real torture.  Again, the angst and anguish reveal more concern with elites' opinions than dealing with historical and political reality.  But, hey, there is a simple cure to all of this.  We don't need waterboarding, sleep deprivation or any other practice that has all our sensitive people all atwitter.  We can conduct a very simple interrogation.  We tell the person in the hot seat that we'll ask him so-and-so questions.  He has a choice.  He can answer and his ordeal is done.  If he wants to play hardball, then we play hardball. We have a nice fresh pigskin ready to wrap him in.  He will see the pigskin.  As a good Muslim he will know that if he is wrapped in that pigskin his soul is damned - no paradise, no dark-eyed maidens for perpetuity.  If he's a good Muslim, he'll talk.  If he doesn't, then all we have is a run-of-the-mill thug who can be disposed of or handed back to his own country's authorities (if they elect to dispose of him - so what?).  Use their religion against them.  The British employed the practice successfully on the Northwest Frontier of India for decades.

Posted By: Dauric  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Wolfgang, I notice you use the Roman empire and the British empire to support your position, both of which have failed to endure.

You may get short-term results, but in the long run they fail.

$0.02

Posted By: bach ave  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

New Euphemisms:



Enemy combatant............(P.O.W.)

Enhanced interrogation....(torture)

Support our troops........(shut up)

P.C......(Politically contemptible)





*May contain dysphemisms.

Posted By: Kevin C.  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Thank you, Dauric, for saying, more eloquently, what I was trying to get across.

I notice that you listed several of the methodologies by which we won the Cold War.  you've left out the actual mechanism of the U.S.S.R.'s collapse; economic meltdown.

They poured massive amounts of money into their unsustainable military-industrial complex, particularly during their decade long failure of a war in Afghanistan, while ignoring the plight of their citizens.  They amassed an enormous national debt while, at the same time, coddling their wealthy elite and heaping all of the responsibility onto the working classes.   The poor they discounted, leaving them to their own devices by minimizing or removing any social welfare programs, any not directed at corporations that is.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar to any of the staunch neo-cons out there?

Posted By: Reta Tallman  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

George plays both ends here again. One time we'll read something he's very conservative on, others he leans left. Ho hum. But here goes: We do not have to release prisoners until the CONFLICT HAS ENDED to ensure they do not return to the fight. This applies to both legal combatants - who wear uniforms et al, as well as illegal ones. Ending a conflict doesn't have to include a formal signing or ceremony but we haven't reached the end of the Iraq conflict ergo these prisoners must be held. Perhaps they will be put somewhere less objectionable than Guantanamo seems to be to everyone, but that's another story. To say what the administration has done is violating democratic principles isn't correct. Military commissions in place today are the traditional ones except they come with a lot more due process if you compare them with those of the Civil War or WWII. These days our legal system, civilian courts play a limited, appellate role of reviwing at an appropriate time, decisions rendered by military justice system Since 9-11 legal environment, civilian courts have begun to review such decisions through a habeas-styled process with a highly differential standard. Since enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, the D.C. Circuit has been designated as the court with exclusive jurisdiction to review the decisions of military commissions and CSRTs.

Posted By: Wolfgang  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Dauric says:



"Wolfgang, I notice you use the Roman empire and the British empire to support your position, both of which have failed to endure.



You may get short-term results, but in the long run they fail."



Let's see, the Roman Empire (at least in the West) lasted from Augustus' coronation to the deposing of Romulus Agustulus in 476.  That's just about 500 years - half a millenia.  The eastern hlf of the Empire, after morphing into Byzantium, lasted until 1453 - though I'll be picky and cut it off when the Venetians sacked Constantinople in the early 1200's.  That's almost another 600 years.  As for the British Empire, if it wasn't for Britain sacrificing her long-term economic interests in choosing to resist Hitler rather than opt for the negotiated peace AND the United States stabbing it in the back, first immediately after WWII over demanding repayment of all monies loaned during the war (even the Labour government was initially willing to fight to keep India) , and, second over Suez in 1956, the empire would probably still be around, though more likely in a much more robust Commonwealth.  I stand by my comments - and I'll add that Americans, generally, don't like to hear historical comparisons because they are generally very ignorant about history, even that of their own country let alone anything that happened outside our borders.

Posted By: Paul K  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Wolfgang, no one is talking about treating the Gitmo prisoners with "kid gloves". Habeas corpus hardly counts as kid gloves. Second of all, you seem to fall into the trap of pre-judging who those people are based purely on the fact that they are there. If the police always got it right, we would not need courts, right? If the military only picked up and detained those were truly guilty, no one would care. If you have been in the legal profession, you should know better, else you are so jaded that you just assume everyone is guilty.

Many of those captured were Taliban soldiers - yes, the Taliban were the government, so they are soldiers. No one knows how many were irregulars, or "terrorists" since our government is choosing to control and hide almost all information - much of it damning to our government and its methods of picking these people up (not to mention flimsy or no evidence).

Asking if Waterboarding is torture or suggesting it is better than fraternity hazing is either very cynical or you are too blinded to see what you are saying. Making someone think they are drowning is torture; we called it torture when it was used on our people. Many of the "intensive" techniques used by the CIA are in fact torture, many of them borrowed from the USSR and the Nazis. None borrowed from fraternities.

As to the Geneva convention. Your contention that we should behave as badly as the worst of the countries we fight shows you understand very little about what this country is about. In the same way that our police are expected to hold to laws and rules in spite of the criminals not doing so, our military is expected to demonstrate the ideals of democracy whenever and wherever possible. Remember the "hearts and minds" concept? We are not trying to win the hearts and minds of corrupted government officials or terrorists, but rather the broad cross section of the people. When the people do not see the terrorist's ways as valid, they will not join or help them. When the people see our way is better, they will reject their government when and where they can - it is a slow process. Even in Iraq we this working where the people compare Al Queida killing innocents with our more restrained approach, and they force Al Queida out.

Your blow up everyone to save them mentality has failed in every generation it has been tried. You no longer have "terrorists", you instead get revolutions and rebellions.

Posted By: Dauric  on Tuesday, June 24, 2008

The problem about the end of the conflict is that the "Conflict" is ill defined. These are not "Iraq War" prisoners, these are "War on Terrorism" prisoners (Haven been taken from Afghanistan as well as other nations in the region). "Terrorism" is a methodology, not a nation or even a religion. When does the conflict end? How do you define the end of a methodology? If you declare it a war on a Religious Methodology, how do you define the end of that?

It's like "War on Drugs" (which has been remarkably unending) or a "War on Poverty" (which is meaningless unless the army is overrunning hobo-held positions.. that sounds like a skit from "Family Guy")

Without any other delimiter for the duration, such as a -clearly defined- objective, there is no "End" to the warfare, no end to the imprisonment at Guantanamo.

As far as Wolfgang's interrogation techniques, read the FBI report, they're already doing it. Using someone's religion as a means of extracting information is just as flawed as any means of torture. Eventually they'll tell you anything you want to hear, anything they think you want to hear. Remember that in their part of the world that's how torture works, not to get accurate intel, they're conditioned by the prevailing governments of the region to confess to what the interrogators tell them to.

Posted By: maria  on Thursday, June 26, 2008

Maybe if more people read Barbara Tuchman's book, The March of Folly, they would have more insight into what is happening in this country.  I guess Georgie boy really showed his father he could do a bang-up job. I only pray that we can recover from this.  

Posted By: Tim  on Thursday, June 26, 2008

Given that at least one innocent man was caught in the hell of Gitmo, how do we know that it hasn't happened more than once? Of course we assume that many of the detainees are guilty of something, but until we PROVE it we don't KNOW it.



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/28/60minutes/main3976928.shtml

Posted By: Maria M  on Friday, June 27, 2008

A true conservative will not try to abridge the right of habeas corpus, instituted to keep King George from detaining the colonists and suspending their rights because they were "offshore" to use a contemporary term.  George Bush is a tax and spend fraud, not a conservative, and McCain is not a true conservative either.  Neither are the right wing Christians.  A true conservative looks more like what we call a Libertarian, who would shudder at abridgment of the original limitations on government, including indefinite detentions.  And to those asserting the GITMO detainees are legally held because they are POW's, the argument would be stronger if the administration would follow the procedures instituted for their treatment, including regular visits by the Red Cross, the prohibition against torture and ill treatment and the kangaroo courts that demonstrate the administration's true intention, which is apparently to secure convictions without evidence.  If the administration had put one tenth the energy into investigating, charging and supporting the charges that they have into obfuscation of due process we might actually have this issue behind us and those guilty convicted by now.