It should be noted that those who've been saying Tsarnaev should be treated as an enemy combatant were not saying that he should be given a military trial, since current statutory law doesn't permit that.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham... was suggesting that the administration label him an "enemy combatant" for purposes of intelligence gathering. Graham conceded it's not yet clear whether he could qualify as one -- to do so, the government would need to prove he was linked to Al Qaeda or an Al Qaeda-linked group.The real question is how to extract information, and I'm not seeing that Carney has addressed that. Talk of the "civilian system of justice" here is a distraction.
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221 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 221 of 221The Volokh Conspiracy has a good discussion of Miranda rights and Tsarnaev. And of the house to house searches in Boston.
After the next terror attack, opinions may change; or not.
Lefties never change their opinions.
Lefties never change their opinions.
Madison lefties are still conflicted about Karleton Armstrong. You can't expect them to fathom the evil of the Brothers Tsarnaev.
He's done talking. His lawyer will need concessions from the prosecution from here on.
Lefties never change their opinions.
Not so. But when they do, they're no longer leftists.
I was a liberal/leftist most of my life. However, I thought that meant learning history, studying more than one side of issues, and thinking for myself.
Got that part wrong.
20 bucks sez Michael K. will never change his opinion on the fact that the FBI actually released photos of Eric Rudolph.
Sorry Ritmo.
If you want to do an impersonation of my writing you have to do dense paragraphs. Your impersonation has far too much space between paragraphs.
But, to get back to the discussion. I guess you really have no response.
So, Ritmo.
Lets say we have two interrogators. One who follows the army field manual and one who uses enhanced interrogation methods.
They interrogate the suspect. They ask the question and then they get an answer after using their respective technique. Why would one interrogator not follow up to see whether what the person said was accurate or not, simply because he water boarded the detainee as opposed to,say, yelling at him.
And if it was determined that the detainee had been lying, why couldn't the person water boarding the detainee go back to further interrogation, just as the person who,used the army field manual would.
And further, which do you think the detainee would rather be exposed to- more army field manual interrogation or further water boarding? I'd think their would be greater incentive to be truthful when the consequences for not being truthful is worse.
The problem with torture is that in inures you to the demoralizing aspects of it. Your limits shrink. It is a true slippery slope until torture is justified for minor offenses.
I believe torture can work IF you are trying to corroborate or fill in a small missing blank. In this case, it would likely yield nothing while dehumanizing those doing the torturing.
I'm also astonished anyone would even suggest trying this man as an enemy combatant, especially after the cries of the constitution being obliterated. Military tribunals are a travesty. The thought of trying POWs is pure banana republic.
"Blogger O Ritmo Segundo said...
20 bucks sez Michael K. will never change his opinion on the fact that the FBI actually released photos of Eric Rudolph."
Two years later. You can send the 20 bucks to me later. I doubt you have it to spare.
If he is an enemy combatant, no need to try him. He can simply be held in detention for the duration of the conflict.
Like I mentioned before, President Lincoln held tens of thousands of U.S. citizens in POW camps without charging them, without trying them. Remember, as a matter of law, secession was a non-event - every man who fought for the Confederacy was still an American citizen. And those that were captured on the battlefield were simply imprisoned. No trial, no charges.
There is ample precedent for detaining without charge or trial those who commit war against the United States.
This was an act of war.
Joe wrote:
The problem with torture is that in inures you to the demoralizing aspects of it. Your limits shrink. It is a true slippery slope until torture is justified for minor offenses.
if you are water boarding people for Minor offenses, then of course its unjustifiable. But what about a scenario where you are water boarding a KSM?
What if the extent of your torture is waterboarding and no further, the same method used during training purposes?
And what if your "torture" is only for the purpose of gathering information, and not simply to inflict pain.
What you are actually describing is not torture, but an interrogation.
If you want to see REAL torture check out Sadaam husseins torture rooms on the Internet. There they are cutting out tongues, throwing people off buildings, chopping off arms, and not to get info but just to inflict pain.
If you want to see REAL torture check out Sadaam husseins torture rooms on the Internet. There they are cutting out tongues, throwing people off buildings, chopping off arms, and not to get info but just to inflict pain.
I suspect that hardcore Sullivanists would argue that that's where we'd end up given time. Few of them trust the US military nor do they actually live among them. Their fears stem from ignorance or extrapolations from a few examples.
The Sullivanistic loathing of the military correlated with the DADT era--i.e., when all enlisted were suspected as evil. Now that Obama has lifted that Clintonian order, it's been nothing but effusive praise for those in uniform.
Ritmo:
Which torture has been proven to be really horrible at. Assuming you want accurate information.
How do you know this? It seems in order to know this, you would have to have access to classified information.
Also, to what do you attribute the lack of (serious) terror attacks on US soil? Gitmo, Drone attacks, the Iraq War, assassinating OBL, long lines at Airports, citizen action?
What? The US standing in the world seems to be worse than when Obama took office, so let's rule out the "I'll be nice to you if you are nice to us" stuff.
"Which torture has been proven to be really horrible at. Assuming you want accurate information."
It got us bin Laden.
The attack was low tech, pressure cookers, gunpowder, and ball bearings/BBs, not professional, and the damage was limited, so it is doubtful that it is extremely urgent to interrogate the surviving terrorist. The brother that traveled back to Russia for six months may have gotten terrorist training while he was in Russia but he is dead now (and dead men don't talk).
The police witnessed the younger brother running over the older brother, killing him. That looks to be an air tight case of manslaughter (at least) which will keep the younger brother in prison for several years. That will give authorities plenty of time to interrogate the younger brother about the actual bombing before he is prosecuted for that crime.
It is easy to imagine more difficult scenarios. For example, imagine that a terrorist has planted a nuclear weapon in NYC and it is set to go off in 24 hours. The authorities have the alleged perp and are trying to extract the location of the weapon from the alleged perp before the bomb goes off. Let's further suppose that the authorities have strong reason to believe, based on multiple lines of intelligence, that the threat is real and the alleged perp is the actual perp. Is it ok to water board the alleged perp before NYC is vaporized? Anytime the expected value of damage (i.e. the potential damage times the probability of the damage actually occurring) is huge and there is a severe time constraint, it will be necessary to have an expedited investigation.
Joe wrote:
The problem with torture is that in inures you to the demoralizing aspects of it. Your limits shrink. It is a true slippery slope until torture is justified for minor offenses.
The other problem with torture is using the word torture for everything under the sun.
Even advocates of enhanced interrogation are not saying you should torture people. Torturing has different context than interrogating people.
We should only interrogate people if we need information. We should never torture people.
SO what is interrogation. Interrogation is coercing people to give us info. Anything we might use requires some degree of force on our part.
So what is allowable? Well, it depends on how much we need the info. And the cost for not getting the info.
There is also the question of, what do you do when your traditional route of non enhanced interrogation methods don't actually work. i.e. if we have KSM and need to find out if there are plans in the works, and he clams up what do we do?
Enhanced interrogation therefore is only used in extremely rare circumstances on very specific targets, when traditional interrogation has failed, and when the need to get information is paramount. Short of that, it's not justified.
And even here,enhanced interrogation doesn't mean all is permissable. In the case of Waterboarding though it certainly doesn't shock my conscience. We already use it to train our troops (and we wouldn't say cut their tongues out because that would be torture and you can't torture people even in the context of training them). As such, if we use it on five high level jihadis who are planning to kill thousands of Americans, I can't get too worked up about it.
Why don't we go further and start chopping their tongues out? Because we're not out to torture them for the sake of torture, and because waterboarding works just fine to break most people it's been tried on. And leaves no lasting damage on the people who it's been used on.
Steve Koch wrote:
The police witnessed the younger brother running over the older brother, killing him. That looks to be an air tight case of manslaughter (at least) which will keep the younger brother in prison for several years. That will give authorities plenty of time to interrogate the younger brother about the actual bombing before he is prosecuted for that crime.
It is easy to imagine more difficult scenarios. For example, imagine that a terrorist has planted a nuclear weapon in NYC and it is set to go off in 24 hours. The authorities have the alleged perp and are trying to extract the location of the weapon from the alleged perp before the bomb goes off.
You could imagine more difficult scenarios when it comes to this case as well. What if it's not two brothers but a cell coordinating on attacks. there was a separate plot to plant bombs on trains in Canada. What if this attack were part of that cells plot to carry out multiple attacks.
And what if while we interrogate this brother it becomes clear that not only are their multiple attacks forthcoming but that he and hs brother panted bombs all around the city and that they're scheduled to go off.
All of a sudden it becomes REALLY important to get that information. And what if after revealing this info the brother stops cooperating?
Those who keep calling waterboarding torture neer answer the question as to what they would do if we needed info to stop an imminent attack and traditional interrogation methods hadn't actually worked.
Should we let attacks go forward, because we don't want to muss this guys hair?
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