OT - Innocent men held as Guantanamo Bay prisoners

You may pontificate grandly in such a fashion, but our own Supreme Court has found your reasoning to be totally wrong.

I'll express my concerns in more detail, but first a word from the other side: Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for the Republican moderate senator Olympia Snowe, describing her employer's concerns said: "Do we need all those lawyers going down there to hear their complaints? It seems a little extreme to her. We're talking about enemy combatants."

My concern is that we always felt, and now know, thanks to our Military's own tribunals, a large number of the prisoners were never, and are not now, enemy combatants. We need Habeus Corpus and other court protections to help establish their innocence, or guilt, and to protect them and us from people like Antonia Ferrier.

And you misunderstand the concept of seperation of powers. The supereme court's jurisdiction is written into the constitution, for the very purpose of preventing the other two branches from putting it out of business.

If they are not POWs they are alleged criminals, and must be handled in the criminal justice system. Choose A, or B, there is no C.

If you actually research that history, you'll find that despite our seperation of powers and similar safeguards working fairly well, all three branches have gotten together often enough to make the history books read like one long catalog of fast ones... some judged well by history, many judged poorly.

The argument could be made that since this demonstrates that seperation of powers doesn't really work, we needn't bother to maintain it. But one need only look at the rest of the world, to democracies degenerated during their times of crisis (Germany, for example) to see how much worse things *could have been*

You're right, I missed the part where we offered him asylum and freedom, which he appears to be qualified for in the fashion we've given to thousands of others, and which would be appropriate given what we did to him.

It really is disgusting.

Winfield Hill wrote: > Innocent men are being held at Guantanamo Bay as our prisoners, > according to our Military's tribunals. Our right to know this fact, > and the men's right to tell it, both guaranteed through habeas > corpus, is being taken away by the Bush administration, through a > last minute amendment to the Military Authorization Bill, brought up > on the floor of the Senate without committee deliberations, and > virtually no advance warning. Sheesh! I am so ashamed of our > government. It's extremely distressing.

Habeus Corpus, which derives from the tyranny of the English kings' and their propensity for indefinite detention of dissidents, means a writ, issued by a Court of *jurisdiction*, requiring the government to demonstrate legal cause to "hold the body." Since Guatanamo is offshore, government activities there are not under the *jurisdiction* of any US court, which means among other things, no writ can be issued and no legal cause for the detention is needed. You have no right to publication of information about government activity that is guaranteed proprietary status under much higher Constitutional authority, and the accused have no rights whatsoever.

Recent court decisions don't seem to support that view, which is why there is a move in congress to remove the court's jurisdiction over gitmo.

Really though, can a democracy founded on the idea of seperation of powers tolerate having any area of it's opperations for which a civilian court does not have at least appelate jurisdiction? I think not. The whole premise of our system of government is the realization that absolute power absent a balancing review is an invitatin to abuse

- something recent news stories are proving is every bit as much true in 2005 as it was in the 1790's.

More practically - if you want to claim that habeus corpus does not apply to POWs, then it would seem you need to treat the prisoners as such. Can't have it both ways - either they are illegal combatants - alleged criminals who must receive due process in the criminal court system, or they are legal combatant POWs, essentially prisoners of a political conflict with rights guaranteed by international law.

Amen! And desecrate the bodies in such fashion as is necessary to guarantee them a direct trip to Islamic hell.

...Jim Thompson

What part of innocent is it that you and the gutless nospam, don't understand? It is depressing to see how you feel about people who don't share your skin color, culture, or religion.

The entire country should be down on Bush for asking Congress to change the law for him. He is the least trustworthy, most frightening, president that I can recall.

Then you are either young or have a bad memory.

John

Their religion says they should kill me.

I reject that premise and choose to kill them instead.

You have a problem with that?

Go straight to hell, do not collect $200.

Leftist weenies can't push their communist agenda via the legislative process, so they want to pack the courts instead.

Fortunately the 9th Circuit will be left to the western leftist weenie states to signal their final demise and the SW will get a new court of their own.

Good riddance.

...Jim Thompson

The Muslim religion does NOT say that. Even Bush recognized this fact in one of his speeches immediately after 9-11.

Just how many billions are you going to kill?

Excuse, me it's you who are packing the courts. Don't worry, Jim, the country is getting FED UP with George W Bush, and we'll see the result of that soon enough in the congress.

And you can kindly stop calling those of us to the left of George W Bush (about 65% of the country now), communists.

That's the general idea. Just three more years. Maybe less.

Well, it's a poor topic to attempt irony with. Also, it's safe to assume Jim was *not* being ironic.

You are like wayyyy behind the curve here, Courts only have jurisdiction as authorized by law enacted by Congress.

The deal is that these are terrorists so that the US is not bound by treaty to treat them as POWs. The alleged crimes were committed against Americans in territory outside of US jurisdiction, so now that they are being thumbscrewed they want to turn everything around and demand protection under US jurisdictional law. Well- it's not going to work that way- they're screwed.

I think it changed the way most of us think, the question is, how did it change us?

Maybe you missed the part about "The Defense Department says it is trying to arrange for a country to take him -- some country other than his native communist China, where Muslims like Adel are routinely tortured."

The first place that spells out the powers of courts is the constitution. It also spells out powers for the congress and the executive branch.

Either you are trolling, intentionally disingenuous or extremely stupid. Based on prior posts of yours, I think I can rule out stupidity, but that leaves two alternatives. Would you care to clarify?

So which president gets your vote..... Don't be so shy. I have a fair memory, and the younger Roosevelt is the first president of whom I have any recollection.

I am not "pontificating"- it was a plain and simple statement of historical fact. How you can construe that as pontificating I will never know. You are the one raving hysterically about dictatorship. And this Willett nutcase gets everyone's hair raised by *falsely* stating that Habeus Corpus is being abolished without qualification- patently untrue.

The case in point was about an appeal to Federal Court over the Military Tribunal decision of innocence with no release of the prisoner. There is no place to which the prisoner can be released. How difficult is that to understand? The author of the article is a confused idiot, the legal process was applied fairly in the detainee's favor- but he plays that down- preferring to rave about a detention out of necessity. Is this Adel still being interrogated and mistreated- deprived of food and sleep? I think not- and I know so because P.Sabin Willett, a sorry excuse for a lawyer and of subnormal intelligence, would have been raving about it. You need to back up and stop letting these nutcases get you upset over nothing. The whole damned thing is about selling newspapers.