Guatonomo detainees have right say supreme courts

[Elfdart]

If McCain thinks it's a good idea to lock people up or lynch them without a fair trial, then what the Vietnamese did to him (if his story is true) is not only right and just, but they would have been justified in stringing him up. After all, he confessed to murdering civilians in Vietnam.

[Patrick Degan]

If McCain thinks it's a good idea to lock people up or lynch them without a fair trial, then what the Vietnamese did to him (if his story is true) is not only right and just, but they would have been justified in stringing him up. After all, he confessed to murdering civilians in Vietnam.

Methinks he should be made to eat that every fucking day until November.

[Elfdart]

Surely someone has a copy of the tapes of McCain admitting to war crimes. Someone should play them. When McCain or his supporters whine about how McCain only did it because he was tortured, point out that if evidence obtained under torture is good enough to be used against people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it's good enough to be used against McCain.

It's one or the other: Either McCain is a mass murderer and needs to be locked up, tried by a kangaroo court, or executed; or Mohammed deserves to be freed. Every argument for McCain applies in spades to KSM. Every argument against KSM applies in spades to McCain.

[sketerpot]

I used to have some residual shred of respect for John McCain left over from when he was running as a less conservative opponent to Bush back in 2000, back when he seemed to have some principles.

That respect is gone. McCain is a pitiful excuse for a presidential candidate and an unprincipled shill for the Bush administration.

“We are now going to have the courts flooded with so-called … habeas corpus suits against the government, whether it be about the diet, whether it be about the reading material. And we are going to be bollixed up in a way that is terribly unfortunate because we need to go ahead and adjudicate these cases,” he said at a town hall meeting in New Jersey.

Frivolous lawsuits like "Stop holding me without trial." Frivolous lawsuits like "I've been in here for six years and have yet to be charged with a crime." Frivolous lawsuits like "Please stop torturing me."

McCain said he has worked hard to ensure the U.S. military does not torture prisoners but that the detainees at Guantanamo are still “enemy combatants.”

McCain has repeatedly defended and voted for torture and spouted the administration's "what we do is not torture because we're doing it and we don't torture" circlespeak. Damn lies.

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,” he said. “Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

No, you fascist scumbag, they are people. Ever heard of human rights? Hell, haven't you ever read the part of the Declaration of Independence that talks about "unalienable rights" and the "self evident" idea that all men are created equal?

Contrary to what McCain says, US citizens are not the only people who matter. US citizens not the only people with rights. The rest of the world is not filled with dirty subhumans who can be stepped on at the whims of fearmongering demogogues.

This paragraph is just so fractally wrong that I'm going to go back and quote parts of it again:

“These are people who are not citizens. They do not and never have been given the rights that citizens in this country have,”

PEOPLE ARE NOT GIVEN RIGHTS! Rights are not yours to give or take; they belong to every person, and they morally follow from personhood -- not from the mercy of the government. This is one of the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded.

“Now, my friends, there are some bad people down there. There are some bad people.”

And I would sooner have all those alleged bad people go free than have a single innocent person detained indefinitely without charges in your illegal and immoral system of military prisons. There's a damn good reason that "Innocent until proven guilty" is so deeply enshrined in our legal system: without it, innocence and guilt cease to matter, and the "law" depends entirely on what the people in power want to do to you. Letting a few guilty people escape from justice is a small price to pay for this fundamental protection, because it is what lets us have rights at all.

And now McCain is pissing on all of our rights by declaring the prisoners guilty and claiming that his opinion on this is above the law. He is a natural authoritarian, a J. Edgar Hoover for the new millennium.

Barack Obama released a statement Thursday saying the Supreme Court decision “ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice while also protecting our core values.”

“The Court’s decision is a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo - yet another failed policy supported by John McCain,” he said. “This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus.”

As if we needed another reason to vote for the former Constitutional Law professor.

[Darth Wong]

There's a damn good reason that "Innocent until proven guilty" is so deeply enshrined in our legal system

Correction: "Innocent until proven guilty" was deeply enshrined in your legal system.

[sketerpot]

There's a damn good reason that "Innocent until proven guilty" is so deeply enshrined in our legal system

Correction: "Innocent until proven guilty" was deeply enshrined in your legal system.

It still is. Our criminal court system is organized around it, and this is common to most legal systems based on the British Comon Law -- your own country has almost the same words in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The problem is that Bush and Congress have been rapidly expanding the power of the executive branch, and conservatives have been specifically attacking the judicial branch and trying to neuter the courts. It's no coincidence that conservatives are the people who rant about "activist judges" all the time. The US Supreme Court has done this same thing several times before: a law says that Guantanamo Bay detainees don't have habeas corpus, and SCOTUS strikes the law down. Then Bush gets pissy and refused to obey the law, and the then-Republican-controlled congress quickly passes another unconstitutional law supporting the violation of habeas corpus again. The courts are stuck in a legislative treadmill just trying to get the rest of the government to follow the most basic parts of the law.

The US badly needs a better system of judicial review that will let the courts strike down unconstitutional laws quickly when they're almost identical to laws that just got struck down for being unconstitutional.

[Shroom Man 777]

Can I get an article on McCain's war crimes?

[Elfdart]

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j092999.html

The problem with this article is that I don't think you can get hold of the sources Raimondo refers to online. An article in a Paris newspaper from 1973 would probably be on microfilm if it exists.

This one (again, if the quotes are real) is also pretty damning:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/06/6878/

Mai Van On, a 50-year-old resident of Hanoi, watched the crash and left the safety of his air-raid shelter to rescue him. Other Vietnamese tried to stop him. “Why do you want to go out and rescue our enemy?” they yelled. Ignoring his countrymen, On grabbed a pole and swam to the spot where McCain’s plane had gone down in 16 feet of water. McCain had managed to free himself from the wrecked plane but was stuck underwater, ensnared by his parachute. On used his pole to untangle the ropes and pull the semi-conscious pilot to the surface. McCain was in bad shape, having broken his arm and a leg in several places.

McCain is lucky the locals didn’t finish him off. U.S. bombs had killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians, many in Hanoi. Ultimately between one and two million innocents would be shredded, impaled, blown to bits and dissolved by American bombs. Now that one of their tormentors had fallen into their hands, they had a rare chance to get even. “About 40 people were standing there,” On later recalled. “They were about to rush him with their fists and stones. I asked them not to kill him. He was beaten for a while before I could stop them.” He was turned over to local policemen, who transferred him to the military.

What if one of the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center had somehow crash-landed in the Hudson River? How long would he have lasted? Would anyone have risked his life to rescue him?

An impolite question: If a war is immoral, can those who fight in it–even those who demonstrate courage–be heroes? If the answer is yes, was Reagan wrong to honor the SS buried at Bitburg? No less than Iraq, Vietnam was an undeclared, illegal war of aggression that did nothing to keep America safe. Tens of millions of Americans felt that way. Millions marched against the war; tens of thousands of young men fled the country to avoid the draft. McCain, on the other hand, volunteered.

McCain knew that what he was doing was wrong. Three months before he fell into that Hanoi lake, he barely survived when his fellow sailors accidentally fired a missile at his plane while it was getting ready to take off from his ship. The blast set off bombs and ordnance across the deck of the aircraft carrier. The conflagration, which took 24 hours to bring under control, killed 132 sailors. A few days later, a shaken McCain told a New York Times reporter in Saigon: “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”

Yet he did.

“I am a war criminal,” McCain said on “60 Minutes” in 1997. “I bombed innocent women and children.” Although it came too late to save the Vietnamese he’d killed 30 years earlier, it was a brave statement. Nevertheless, he smiles agreeably as he hears himself described as a “war hero” as he arrives at rallies in a bus marked “No Surrender.”

McCain’s tragic flaw: He knows the right thing. He often sets out to do the right thing. But he doesn’t follow through. We saw McCain’s weak character in 2000, when the Bush campaign defeated him in the crucial South Carolina primary by smearing his family. Placing his presidential ambitions first, he swallowed his pride, set aside his honor, and campaigned for Bush against Al Gore. It came up again in 2005, when McCain used his POW experience as a POW to convince Congress to pass, and Bush to sign, a law outlawing torture of detainees at Guantánamo and other camps. But when Bush issued one of his infamous “signing statements” giving himself the right to continue torturing–in effect, negating McCain’s law–he remained silent, sucking up to Bush again.

McCain’s North Vietnamese captors demanded that he confess to war crimes. “Every two hours,” according to a 2007 profile in the Arizona Republic, “one guard would hold McCain while two others beat him. They kept it up for four days…His right leg, injured when he was shot down, was horribly swollen. A guard yanked him to his feet and threw him down. His left arm smashed against a bucket and broke again.”

McCain later recalled that he was at the point of suicide. But he was no Jean Moulin, the French Resistance leader who refused to talk under torture, and killed himself. According to “The Nightingale’s Song,” a book by Robert Timberg, “[McCain] looked at the louvered cell window high above his head, then at the small stool in the room.” He took off his dark blue prison shirt, rolled it like a rope, draped one end over his shoulder near his neck, began feeding the other end through the louvers.” He was too slow. A guard entered and pulled him away from the window.

I’ve never been tortured. I have no idea what I’d do. Of course, I’d like to think that I could resist or at least commit suicide before giving up information. Odds are, however, that I’d crack. Most people do. And so did McCain. “I am a black criminal and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate,” McCain wrote in his confession. “I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors.”

It wasn’t the first time McCain broke under pressure. After his capture, wrote the Republic, “He was placed in a cell and told he would not receive any medical treatment until he gave military information. McCain refused and was beaten unconscious. On the fourth day, two guards entered McCain’s cell. One pulled back the blanket to reveal McCain’s injured knee. ‘It was about the size, shape and color of a football,’ McCain recalled. Fearful of blood poisoning that would lead to death, McCain told his captors he would talk if they took him to a hospital.”

McCain has always been truthful about his behavior as a POW, but he has been more than willing to allow others to lie on his behalf. “A proven leader, and a man of integrity,” The New York Post says, and he’s happy to take it. “All he had to do was denounce his country. He refused…” Not really. He did denounce his country. But he didn’t demand a retraction.

It’s the old tragic flaw: McCain knows what he ought to do. He starts to do the right thing. But John McCain is a weak man who puts his career goals first.

There's more at the link.