Today’s Topic: A Constitutional Conversation, Part 2
This is a continuation of my conversation with Milton Scritsmier:
I said:
When the Navy website suggests that Gitmo is indeed an American Territory than is that any different that when a Supreme Court Justice declares corporations have the rights of a person? Even if it makes a more acceptable place for enemy combatants to be held without redress to the American court system, we have court and non-court precedence that make Gitmo an American Territory. We could reign there for time Immemorial and still it would be a lease? We exhibit sovereignty over Gitmo ipso facto we have sovereignty.
Milton replied:
I still have to disagree with you on this one. While a whole stack of things like website pages do have some legal standing, I just don't see how they can stand up to a direct Supreme Court decision. I do have a question for you that is a little off the topic of whether or not the prisoners in Gitmo should have full access to our legal system. Have you considered that it would be nearly impossible to convict any terrorist captured on a (foreign) battlefield? Any captured terrorist would immediately need to be Mirandized (in Arabic), presumably by the soldier that captured him, or else that would be grounds for dropping the charges.
First off, I contend that if we act like we have sovereignty than we do. Legalities be damned.
However, I don’t contend that an opposing soldier deserves criminal treatment in the sense of a guy who stole an old lady’s purse or even John Wayne Gacy, but the fact that establishing people who fight against America as enemy combatants, and then extending that to "illegal" enemy combatants is just a "go around" for this administration to treat these people any way they want.
The concept of wearing a specific uniform issued by a sovereign power being the deciding factor is specious at best. Even the U. S., prior to being the U. S., fought sans uniforms against the British during the American Revolution. Using something as baseless as not having uniforms shouldn’t be a qualifier for treating our enemies as if they don’t deserve basic human rights and reasonable determination of their status.
And one must admit that in countries such as Afghanistan, which American could decide that they WEREN’T wearing what they considered to be uniforms other than the President? In Saudi Arabia the significant aspect of familial or governmental affiliation resides directly in the headdress, not a full body uniform. Palestinians are much the same.
However, one only has to look at how the U.S. treated German POWs to understand the difference between Prisoners of War and "enemy combatants". Largely we are talking about a normal soldier who is simply following orders and as such were treated with a great amount of respect once captured. Many were brought to the United States and interred in POW camps in the south where prisoner congregation wasn’t denied, where the prisoners were responsible for building their own quarters, and when quarters were only tents, then American soldiers who guarded the Germans lived in tents too. Respect for the human condition.
It is interesting to note that when the war was over a significant portion of Germans held on American soil chose to stay and work towards citizenship.
And yet interment alone shows that American soldiers are indeed sometimes prison guards. They are never cops nor are opposing soldiers criminals, so no such attitude should be taken as to how enemy combatants are captured, but how they are treated goes a long way towards defining the country they were captured by in the world’s opinion.
A lot could be learned from how the U.S. treated German soldiers.
Conditionally, one would suppose that the capture of Afghanis who ended up in Gitmo would have been any number of soldiers without knowledge of any big goals but more likely glad to be fighting America. And with the number of events influenced by either indirect or direct covert actions in that particular region, I don’t blame them. We didn’t like the British becoming more involved with America’s day to day life and we kicked them out. Thus, to the victor go the spoils.
But I can’t even blame Eisenhower’s approval of Allan Foster Dulles’ CIA actions to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected President to install the Shah (nor Dulles' later plan to overthrow Castro which was foisted upon John Kennedy). The middle east, and in specific, Iraq, has had problems since WWI when the British established Iraq as a country even though the populace didn’t want to be a "country". But I do blame American governmental policy for bringing this country to its lowest standing in the world it has ever had, and this downfall has happened due to an accumulation of governmental interference.
As an aside, it took the British 2 years to conquer Baghdad, which should have shown some of this administration that the people are tough enough to tough it out. Seven thousand years of history is a hard thing to overcome. They have exceeded that by a number of years already.
So our problems started in 1924. It’s just taken 80+ years to adversely affect us.
It seems that our soldiers would have to become very much like police officers, and in my mind that starts to violate the spirit of the Posse Comitatus Act.
And here we have a point of contention I’ve had since this war began and have spoken of previously on this blog. The employment of mercenaries, (i.e. contractors) has allowed President Bush to already test the legal limits by deploying these same Iraq war contractors on New Orleans’ streets within one week after Katrina hit, apparently with both the legal right of arrest, and the use of deadly force. This information came from interviews that I believe were published in the New York Times and is researchable.
So where is Posse Comitatus when the government can put armed contractors on the streets of America with questionable authority, and who gave them that authority?
Want another example of Bush’s attempts to end Posse Comitatus? How about shutting down numerous National Guard bases across the U.S., supposedly for the purposes of cutting costs, but the actual fact is that has precipitated the inability of the National Guard to reasonably respond to dire circumstances when they would normally have both the strength of personnel and local response time.
And yet there is one more example of ending Posse Comitatus, which is a Presidential Declaration that under circumstances of calamitous events, such as an outbreak of a human infection from bird flu, the U.S. Army will be the responding unit of the federal government. Booted feet on the streets of America only under the control of the President.
The fabric of the Constitution is unraveling ever more quickly. The New Deal is being undone, and our treaties with the world are naught but fodder for those who would ignore them.
If the concept of American sovereignty was extended far enough it would even become an actual violation. I assume you don't care about the final disposition of the terrorists as long as it is done legally under our criminal system.
Here’s where we actually don’t have a conflict. I don’t need the prisoners at Gitmo to become criminal defendants in American courts, but I do require that they receive the same respect that any criminal in the American justice system receives.
It is one thing to be imprisoned by a foreign government, but it’s even more so a problem when being treated as a criminal with no rights equates to being a human being with a diametrically opposed ideology. And the worst part is that these guys just may have a legitimate argument.
And this is my real argument. This administration supposes that they can do what they want with those captured opposing American machinations and domination whilst remaining aloof when it comes to becoming a signatory to the World Court because they don’t want our "soldiers" being held for war crimes. More likely than not it would be those who instigate and direct wars of choice would be held for war crimes, just as it was at Nuremberg. Hmmm, stare decisis raising its ugly head again!
Guilty people should still be punished.
Ah, in such a case as, say, Scooter Libby?
You know, when it all comes down to the rubber hitting the road, one will always have this to say. Both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush have weakened the Presidency by supplying pardons and commutations at the most inexplicable times.
And just to make it clear, I don’t necessarily go along with all of the Clinton pardons either, but I don’t see how any of those players have suddenly become involved with government again when they were already convicted of having broken the laws of government.
It’s not bad enough that Elliot Abrams was pardoned by Bush41. No, we had to have Bush43 appoint Elliot to even higher offices within the executive, regardless of the fact that an Executive Pardon equates to an admission of guilt. But no, that’s not even bad enough, because when George W. Bush wanted to start gathering all the information of everybody in the country, better known as the Total Awareness database, he chose Admiral John Poindexter to run the program. Another convicted Iran-Contra player whose conviction was only overturned on a legal technicality. At that point who knows whether it was Bush41’s interference as to further prosecution. After all, the conviction was overturned due to a technicality, not due to lack of evidence including Poindexter’s testimony to Congress.
And so I say that yes, we as a people are bathed in Democracy, and yet the bathing apparently will never get us clean. If we’re dirty then who are we to complain when confronted with our apparent filthiness or stench?
2:59:37 PM 
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