Stupid. Stupid. STUPID. Not to mention villainous and contemptible.

[fpb]

Nearly every right-wing American commentator in the last two days has gone doolally about the guilty sentence against a terrorist involved in the infamous bombing of the US embassy in Tanzania. With all the grace and intellectual gravitas of a lynch mob, they all howl at the judge, yell at the jury (traditional legal rights such as being tried by

Comments

[jordan179]

Ahmed Ghailani was captured on a foreign battlefield as an active Al Qaeda fighter. He was never supposed to have been tried in a civilian court for "murder," but rather before a military tribunal for his war crimes, which included participating in a deliberate lethal attack agianst a diplomatic embassy. Obama, by shifting this trial to a civilian court, ensured that standards of evidence and procedure would be applied which Ghailani's original captors never expected to be applied.

What the court has now decided is that dozens of African lives taken in an attack on an embassy in a neutral country are worth about as much to them as, say, one or two American security guards shot in a bank heist. Congratulations.

[fpb]

Torture. Is. Not. Admissible. Under. Any. System. Of. Law.

Congratulations on trying to remove the USA from the number of civilized countries.

[jordan179]

Francs-tireurs. Have. No. Rights. In. War.

Congratulations on trying to erase the distinction between legitimate and unlawful combatants in war, giving combatants absolutely no sane reason to bother with obeying the Laws of War.

[fpb]

Your friend was not a worse criminal than the Nazi leadership. Who were condemned and executed within the law. And if you refuse to understand that, understand this: this is the same mentality that gave us Abu Ghraib - the worst publicity disaster suffered by the USA in thirty years. And of course everyone knows that the enemy does ten worse things every hour of the day. So bloody what? Are you trying to be judged by the standards of Al Qaeda? Of course we demand better behaviour from Western troops. Americans are not supposed to be brutes. You are not allowed to take pride in Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr.'s heroism ( http://fpb.livejournal.com/149173.html ) if you then make excuses for military brutality. It is not whether the prisoners have any rights, but whether we have any duties. It is not whether the accused deserves due process, but whether due process is to be applied at all. And speaking purely as a historian, I say that people who take shortcuts, who allow

[ani_bester]

I know there is a lot of back and forth under whether or not he should have been tried in a civilian court, but I'd sure as freaking heck like to think that civilian or military would have made no difference to the fact that the tainted their own evidence with the heinous manner they gathered it (I doubt it, I'm not naive, but I can hope

[ext_369605]

The thing is that the rule’s are different between civilian and military court’s much like the deference between civil court’s and criminal court’s. deferent standards of evidence deferent burden of proof deferent standards for just how sure you have to be (agine it’s easer to get a conviction in civil court’s than criminal). Cause frankly or at least notionally there set up to deal with deferent things.

“ or a legitimate informaiton gathering device or all that other”

Frankly there are no fundamentally “nice” way’s to get somebody to tell you something thay don’t want to (the vary definition of personal intelligence gathering). It dosen’t get any nicer than physiological trickery…..the thing that must be worked out is what tactics ARE permissible. The guy’s that are given the thankless task of finding this stuff out need to be given concret guide lines.

[fpb]

Being kept awake seven days at a time or being given the physical sense of being about to die of drowning is not permissible. End of story.