Hi, Necra, nice to see you again. Let's tackle this one issue at a time.
You can't have POWs when you haven't declared a war on a sovereign nation. You see, there's that thing where POW stands for "Prisoner of WAR", and therefore, if there is no WAR, there is no prisoners of it. It is also true that even if they were POWs, they are entitled to fair treatment under the Geneva Conventions of which the United States of America is a signatory, despite members of the current administration referred to it as "quaint" and stating flat-out that they do not intend to abide by it with regards to treatment at Gitmo (until the sudden turn-around just the other day, that is).
Edit: Let me make this even more clear for you, in several ways.
- First, not everyone at Gitmo is al-Qaeda-related. Many of them are there due to alleged connections to the Taliban, which was the government of Afghanistan. So the "wah wah wah, they're terrorists and not entitled to basic human rights" argument is not only wrong, but was wrong from the outset.
-As the Supreme Court pointed out, Article 3 of the Geneva conventions covers prisoners caught in "wars not of an international character", which thereby covers alleged al-Qaeda members who were caught during the civil war in Afghanistan, which the US has in detention in Gitmo.
-The Supreme Court did NOT say they must be classified as POWs. It simply said the Geneva Conventions must be applied to them, and unless the administration wants to make and pass new laws to cover the situation, the President does not have the authority to run the closed, limited, no-presumption-of-innocence trials the US had been intending to run. Note too that the US was ALWAYS planning to run trials, and your comparison to World War II soldiers is thus patently false, since trials were always going to take place; it is that the US administration was dragging its feet for years on the matter, and that the trials they planned to run were illegal.
-What Bush tried to do was not only illegal under the Geneva Conventions, and involved unconstitutional acts, but was also illegal under the US laws of military justice. If you think that it should be fine for a President to do that, I must question why you don't call him 'King', or perhaps 'Emperor'. I'd also be very curious to know how tolerant you would be of flagrant violations of the law by a Democratic president.
Neither the courts nor the legislature are required to ask you to change the laws of the land. The entire goddamn point is that courts are a neutral body that interprets from the Constitution and legal precedent, and that if J. Q. Citizen don't like what laws the legislature passes, you can vote against the representatives who passed them in the next appropriate election. There is a bazillion legal precedents for this. In fact, EVERYTHING is a legal precedent of this. How can you be so incredibly ignorant of this? It is only the basis of your entire fricking government system. "Probably is legally impossible and stupid". Yes, Necra, I'm sure the State court of Massachussetts would be fascinated to hear about your opinions on what is and isn't legally possible.
If you bothered to read up on the situation, you would know that many prisoners in Gitmo are indeed Random J. Bystander. It is also known that a bunch of them have been freed over time, after years of incarceration, due to there not being enough evidence to convict them even in the unbalanced trials that the administration wanted (38 of which were admitted to not even combatants), many of whom have promptly turned around and accused the US of torturing them.
Man, why won't they stop whining about people who tortured them? What the HECK, man?
If you believe otherwise, kindly look up the case of Murat Kurnaz. Or Mustafa Ait Idir. Or Martin Mubanga. Or any of the numbers of other people who were unlawfully detained for years despite being charged with no crime (meaning they were NOT enemy combatants, because the US has admitted as much by releasing them without charging them of anything) and then promptly told stories of being tortured and showed injuries taken at Gitmo.
You can't have POWs when you haven't declared a war on a sovereign nation. You see, there's that thing where POW stands for "Prisoner of WAR", and therefore, if there is no WAR, there is no prisoners of it. It is also true that even if they were POWs, they are entitled to fair treatment under the Geneva Conventions of which the United States of America is a signatory, despite members of the current administration referred to it as "quaint" and stating flat-out that they do not intend to abide by it with regards to treatment at Gitmo (until the sudden turn-around just the other day, that is).
Edit: Let me make this even more clear for you, in several ways.
- First, not everyone at Gitmo is al-Qaeda-related. Many of them are there due to alleged connections to the Taliban, which was the government of Afghanistan. So the "wah wah wah, they're terrorists and not entitled to basic human rights" argument is not only wrong, but was wrong from the outset.
-As the Supreme Court pointed out, Article 3 of the Geneva conventions covers prisoners caught in "wars not of an international character", which thereby covers alleged al-Qaeda members who were caught during the civil war in Afghanistan, which the US has in detention in Gitmo.
-The Supreme Court did NOT say they must be classified as POWs. It simply said the Geneva Conventions must be applied to them, and unless the administration wants to make and pass new laws to cover the situation, the President does not have the authority to run the closed, limited, no-presumption-of-innocence trials the US had been intending to run. Note too that the US was ALWAYS planning to run trials, and your comparison to World War II soldiers is thus patently false, since trials were always going to take place; it is that the US administration was dragging its feet for years on the matter, and that the trials they planned to run were illegal.
-What Bush tried to do was not only illegal under the Geneva Conventions, and involved unconstitutional acts, but was also illegal under the US laws of military justice. If you think that it should be fine for a President to do that, I must question why you don't call him 'King', or perhaps 'Emperor'. I'd also be very curious to know how tolerant you would be of flagrant violations of the law by a Democratic president.
Neither the courts nor the legislature are required to ask you to change the laws of the land. The entire goddamn point is that courts are a neutral body that interprets from the Constitution and legal precedent, and that if J. Q. Citizen don't like what laws the legislature passes, you can vote against the representatives who passed them in the next appropriate election. There is a bazillion legal precedents for this. In fact, EVERYTHING is a legal precedent of this. How can you be so incredibly ignorant of this? It is only the basis of your entire fricking government system. "Probably is legally impossible and stupid". Yes, Necra, I'm sure the State court of Massachussetts would be fascinated to hear about your opinions on what is and isn't legally possible.
If you bothered to read up on the situation, you would know that many prisoners in Gitmo are indeed Random J. Bystander. It is also known that a bunch of them have been freed over time, after years of incarceration, due to there not being enough evidence to convict them even in the unbalanced trials that the administration wanted (38 of which were admitted to not even combatants), many of whom have promptly turned around and accused the US of torturing them.
Man, why won't they stop whining about people who tortured them? What the HECK, man?
If you believe otherwise, kindly look up the case of Murat Kurnaz. Or Mustafa Ait Idir. Or Martin Mubanga. Or any of the numbers of other people who were unlawfully detained for years despite being charged with no crime (meaning they were NOT enemy combatants, because the US has admitted as much by releasing them without charging them of anything) and then promptly told stories of being tortured and showed injuries taken at Gitmo.