Comments on: Justice To President Bush

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:04:10 +0000

palomino70: I believe that an existential crisis is a very real and very sobering possibility.

9-11 should have been a wakeup call for you, but evidently it was not. 9-11 was a pinprick compared to what would happen if terrorists blew up Boulder Dam (the resulting flood would kill 100,000 Americans).

I live in Massachusetts. Due to some bad decisions, the terminal for a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant is located in Everett, so supertankers carrying LNG have to transit Boston Harbor to get there. If terrorists managed to blow up an LNG tanker as it transits Boston Harbor during a normal working day, half of downtown Boston would disappear. A quarter million people would disappear along with it.

And if terrorists got ahold of WMD, they could render entire cities uninhabitable for a very long time to come.

If you look at the past history of terrorist attacks on America, the maximum casualty number has increased by two orders of magnitude: First with the Oklahoma City bombing (168 killed), then with 9-11 (3,000 killed). That's because terrorists want publicity, and they have to keep launching ever more spectacular attacks to get that publicity.

The next attack on America will kill tens of thousands.

By: Jeffryw

Jeffryw — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:38:24 +0000

Palomino, you too seem to ben an intel operative or are stationed at Gitmo because I again would never presume to claim to know something I don’t…to wit the stakes involved when torture is administered.

By: Jeffryw

Jeffryw — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:36:13 +0000

Sinz: You know I was actually going to add “and PAH-.lease don’t bring up Padilla. The case against him is VERY strong.” But I didn;t think that that was still the only case that even whiffed of the accusations you make against the past admin. I would think by now after seven years something else has come up.

By: palomino70

palomino70 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:24:10 +0000

sinz, Re Japan: the sins of the past don’t justify those of the present. It’s easy to look back at 1945 and second-guess Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, etc. But the targeting of civilians by 1945 was an accepted part of WWII. It still presents an ethical dilemma, but seen in the context of the war’s last year and all the attendant carnage, it’s harder to make a case that these bombings represented discrete war crimes. And if they did constitute war crimes, were ANY of the major powers innocent? After all, in 1945 we did have good reason to think we were at risk of being annihilated. But the talk of an existential crisis over the last seven years (often used to justify torture) is just a Cheney-esque dodge. Does anyone really think al-Qaeda or the Taliban is a threat to conquer the US and dismantle our govt?

By: palomino70

palomino70 — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:06:04 +0000

Jeff, It IS just a hypothetical, but I won't sidestep. Of course we're not going to let a city be destroyed if we know that suspect x has lifesaving info; we'll get it out of him one way or another. But there is a HUGE difference between this one-in-a-million scenario and using torture as routine policy in multiple black-op sites. Padilla is just one of many examples, none of whom even allegedly had "ticking time bomb" type info.

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:21:28 +0000

Jeffryw: Please familiarize yourself with the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen reclassified by the Bush Administration as an enemy combatant.

As for civilian enemy combatants caught on a battlefield, you are correct that the U.S. Senate never ratified Protocol 1 Additional of the Geneva Convention, which would have extended Geneva Convention protections to civilian fighters. That Protocol would have made it much harder to fight al-Qaeda; and in fact it would make it much harder to fight any counterinsurgency war in which the insurgents masquerade as civilians and hide among the civilian population.

Nevertheless, there remain moral considerations of human rights in dealing with any captives in any situation. First, the fact that Protocol 1 was ratified by over a hundred other nations, including all our own allies, puts us in an uncomfortable position if we're seen to be blatantly violating it.

Secondly, our own Declaration of Independence argues that all men are entitled to unalienable rights. It didn't say "Americans," it said "All men".

We don't want to treat captive civilian fighters the way the Nazis treated captive members of the Resistance, or the way the Japanese treated captured Filipinos, do we?

And that means we need some clearly specified policies on limits. I will never accept the notion of "Anything goes" with any human being. That's un-American.

By: Jeffryw

Jeffryw — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:55:08 +0000

Sorry Sinz I missed the part of your post where you address enemy combatants. I am curious what US citizens you know of who were recategorized as “enemy combatants”? Not a trick question, I honestly am not aware of any cases but that doesn’t mean anything!

By: Jeffryw

Jeffryw — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:50:25 +0000

I think you are confusing power to torture US CITIZENS with the power to torture FOREIGN ENEMY COMBATANTS.

That is a serious distinction. I see no constitutional protections of any kind that should be afforded men caught on the battelfield waging war against our soldiers.

At Tarawa in 1943, the US Marines tok 16 prisoners out of a Japanese garrison of 5,000. Enemy combatants today should thank their lucky stars that the military of today and not the one during that "good war" scooped em up!

By: sinz54

sinz54 — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:30:54 +0000

Jeffryw: I certainly do agree that there are times when brute force is needed. But I also maintain that I will never trust any ONE branch of the U.S. government with that kind of arbitrary unlimited power.

You asked what they were trying to learn from the waterboarding. I cannot answer that, because AFAIK, there is no public record of just what it was that caused Bush to authorize it in each case. Even though I voted for Bush, I never voted to give Bush that much unchecked executive power.

We conservatives are supposed to stand for limited government, yes? Well, limited government should NOT include unlimited Executive power to torture at their own discretion. And it should NOT include unlimited Executive power to classify anyone (even a U.S. citizen) as an "enemy combatant" at their own discretion, and imprison him without trial, not even by military tribunal. (Not a single terrorist was tried by Bush's system of military tribunals in the first 6 years of his Presidency.)

I'm frankly amazed at how many conservatives could claim they were for "limited government" on the one hand--and on the other hand, support giving the Executive Branch vastly increased powers, including torture and indefinite detention without trial. It was clear that the main reason was that Bush was "our guy," we had voted for him and trusted him, and therefore saw no reason to restrict anything he wanted to do. That's a dangerous attitude to have in any democracy. But it's particularly hypocritical for us conservatives, since we're the ones who crusade for limited, smaller government.

As conservatives, our job should have been to devise legal and Constitutional frameworks that would have given the President the tools he needed to fight terrorism--while at the same time making sure that those tools could not be abused. Instead, we acted as blind cheerleaders, circling the wagons around Bush and anything he wanted to do. And we compromised our principles, and our integrity.

By: Jeffryw

Jeffryw — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:07:04 +0000

Inronically I think your Japan analogy is off because the Japanese did in fact surrender with one MAJOR condition. The maintanence of the emperor. MacArthur needed Hirohito intact to make for an orderly transition of power as there were still over a million Japanese men at arms throughout the Pacific. He gave MacArthur the legitimacy he needed to .

As you correcly observe, Hiroshima was not the most devasting bombing raid - the worst bombing raid in history, indeed the worst single mass killing ever carried out on one day, was the March 9-10 firebobing of Tokyo. By the time we were finished with Nagasaki, Japan had no targets of value left.

Sadly, had we not stuck stubbornly to calls for "unconditional surrender" (a very capricious demand srpung on the allies by FDR at Casablanca much to Chruchill's dismay) the wars both in Europe and against Japan could have been shortened by months saving literally millions of unnecessary deaths on all sides.

But that is a debate for another day. "If we had lost the war, I'd have been tried as a war criminal." Curtis LeMay