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A "legal" international military engagement is not a license for live target practice by the armed forces of a purportedly civilized nation.
The conversation between the pilots and the base clearly indicates that there are no US personnel within easy range of a small bunch of men, only 2 of which appear to be armed. The helicopter is itself in no danger from these men - who were clustered in a circle all facing inward when the firing began. That's a pretty weak battle formation -were they planning a mass suicide? The delay between the sound of the chopper's guns and the bullets' impacts is nearly 2 seconds, which, according to the postings I've seen by guys with combat experience puts the chopper a mile out ( which seems to be standard procedure ) and well out of range of AK-47s and even RPGs. But, while the first set of firing could potentially be excused as there were individuals with weapons, you would really have to burn any "objectivity" out of your eye to defend the firing on the van. I'd be curious to read your explanation as to how that bit of slaughter was warranted. Before you reply, might i trouble you to read http://www.hrweb.org/legal/geneva1.html#Article 15 ?

Article 12
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

(source)

The right to privacy/anonymity applies to everyone, guilty or not. The right is not absolute, but unless there is solid evidence I wouldn't say a private (!) company should be allowed to pass this right. This is what the police is/are for; they can (through court orders or search warrants for example) have the right to investigate you.

Article 50.3 of which geneva convention or protocol?

link

A particular group of civilians, as soon as they are used as cover by a non-civilian, cease to be civilian.

No they don't. They are still civilians, and the law dictates that a commander must choose actions that minimise risk to the civilians, that he must be able to justify any civilian deaths as being proportionate to the military value of the target in terms of the larger war, and that, given alternative choices that achieve the larger objective, he must choose the military action that minimises civilian casualties, even to the extent that it may increase risk to his own troops. link and link

We have special rules for people who recover the wounded

Medical staff are explicitly protected and may not be targeted. Apart from that, I can find no law that protects soldiers in an active battle from being targeted because they are attempted to recover wounded comrades. However, both parties to the battle have a duty afterwards to search for the wounded and to provide medical care to the wounded, regardless of which side they fought on. link

This is going a little afield of the topic, but I think your last paragraph deserves a documented response.

As you probably know, when Reagan signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture, it became the supreme law of the land, as described in Article VI of the United States Constitution:

all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now, you may be saying to yourself "but a treaty is not self-executing - Congress still has to make a law for it to be United States Law!" This is true:

Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998.

The Act also required relevant agencies to promulgate and enforce regulations to implement CAT, subject to the understandings, declarations, and reservations made by the Senate resolution of ratification.

This quotation is from a (PDF) 2004 report that discusses the United States' obligations with respect to the CAT (Convention Against Torture)

So, since waterboarding is torture (your training example involves consent of the subject and I don't think applies here), there was a law against it, and it was done by the United States, it was and is a crime. The Convention not only outlaws torture in all the participant states, but requires them to investigate and prosecute any incidences of torture found within the borders of any participant states. The Convention creates a universal jurisdiction as well - any participant state has jurisdiction to pursue torturers found in any other participant state. This goes some way towards explaining what's going on in Spain.

But we need to look forward not backward.

At the extreme end of things, I can think of countries (like Rwanda) that probably have no laws against genocide, but whose citizens actively participated in genocide.

At the moment politicians can't even agree on what constitutes genocide!!!

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

        * (a) Killing members of the group;
        * (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
        * (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
        * (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
        * (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/udhr.html

Yes, though the percentage of dead through disease is hard to estimate, 95% might be high. It doesn't matter, there was a plan being developed for the survivors. Since elsewhere in the discussion there are those who deny there was a genocide, here's the legal definition of genocide, as adopted by the UN:

Now if one knows much about indigenous-settler relations in N.A., then you know that: wars and disease took care of (a), alcohol and linguistic-cultural suppression took care of (b), forced migration and enclosure and ecodisaster took care of (c), it's coming to light that the mid-20C saw forced sterilizations in many parts of the continent(d), and the residential schools (e) are currently costing taxpayers a fortune in Canada due to massive restitution. The deliberate destruction of hundreds of languages can be laid at the feet of the residential schools, as well as a sorry history of rape, murder, and destroyed families for generations. The last ones closed in Canada in the '70's (not 500 years ago as some of the ideologues are stating in other threads).

...
Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Article 20
Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
No one may be compelled to belong to an association.
Article 21
Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. ...

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

That's what happens when people read the document you try to use to refute their point.

Hmm. You should look up what torture is...

The Wikipedia entry is a good start, to be followed by some of the links provided there, and a very mild amount of googling around. Most notably, there is the UN Convention Against Torture which provides a more legalesian definition in its article 1---of course, the US never ratified that convention and it may very well be, judging from history, that they have changed their mind since they signed, and, in any case, they do not seem to act in a way that shows they attach any value to the conventions they do ratify apart from PR.

Independently of that, I sincerely and humbly fail to imagine how anyone can consider `making someone feel like they are being burned alive' not a form of torture when it is used as a deterrent (and, frankly, when it is used for any other use whatsoever). Note that the absence of permament damage is absolutely irrelevant to the qualification of anything as torture, according to most authorities. Finally, the fact that people do things frequently does not make those things not torture; it is certainly arguable that tear-gassing crowds as a form of control is not a form of torture, but the (remarkably increasing) frequency with with this happens is definitely not an argument for this.

How many US citizens, let alone students, know about the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights? A document which seems to be acknowledged and recognised in almost every member country BUT the USA?

I've had a long time interest in civil rights and constitutional law but never heard of this document until I became an exile and moved from the US to New Zealand. If you read the document you can see it's actually BETTER for the citizens than the US Bill of Rights. No wonder they don't teach about it in schools!

"We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all." - William Reece Smith, Jr.

Freedom unexercised may become freedom forfeited. - Margaret Chase Smith
(example of this, now when you ask for a lawyer to protect yourself from sloppy/lazy police work, you're assumed guilty).

Bullshit. Prison as "rehabilitation" is a relatively recent concept and still unproven. For that matter prison itself is a relatively recent concept - through most of human history somebody who commited a serious crime was either executed or enslaved. There was no third choice.

Article 10.2.3. The penitentiary system shall comprise treatment of prisoners the essential aim of which shall be their reformation and social rehabilitation. Juvenile offenders shall be segregated from adults and be accorded treatment appropriate to their age and legal status.

Maybe because its true?

What's true? That humanity has an immature fascination with killing people? Yes, I know that, it was my point - remember?

My fiancee would have been raped [...] That gun saved her life, without it who knows what would have happened.

Hold on, you just said she would have been raped! Make up your mind, do we know or not?

Self defense is a basic human right,

No, self-defence is not a basic human right. There are thirty articles in the universal declaration of human rights and none of them state that everyone is entitled to defend themselves from attack. See UDHR.

ever wait on the police when their truly needed? What if your a minority? Good luck with that.

Oh, I see... so where you come from minorities are institutionally prejudiced against are they? I can tell you that fair treatment is a human right. Maybe you should be doing something about unfair treatment of whole swathes of the population rather than waiting to blow holes in members of the public.

Because only those who have something to hide need fear the results.

It is not true that only those who have something to hide that fear the results. If you are pulled over by the police, searched for weapons and drugs, fingerprinted, taken down to the station for interrogation and then released again, you could say that the results of this search are in your favor (they didn't find anything suspicious, right?), but another result of this search is that your consitutional and human rights have been severely violated. Some people are afraid of that, quite rightfully so.

Because it is not your life, it's our life, and we permit you to live it only as long as you continue to be worth more to us alive

The concept of the "natural rights" of humans goes back to the enlightenment and the evolution of it is nowadays generally reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You may want to read it sometime:

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/udhr.html

Everything can be relativated and relativated and relativated some more. The result is usually a diluted and mostly meaningless statement: The only reason you're still alive is because someone hasn't decided to kill you yet. In fact, you're still alive is because your seventh grade English teacher decided to let you live. You owe him your life. Back then you were worth more to him alive than dead or seen otherwise, the potential consequences of his killing you outweighed the benefits of getting rid of you. What if he has a terminal illness now and bears a grudge against you? Now the balance has changed and three to six months in prison may be worthwhile for getting the ultimate revenge againt you for not paying attention in class and ridiculizing him. Since your life is not yours but rather ours and thus partially his, wouldn't it be his right to act in his interests and kill you?

It also violates the UN's Convention on the Rights of the Child, which, amongst other things disallows experimentation on children.

Article 23

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

...

Article 25

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

In short, the license does anything but promote human rights. Rather, it discriminates against some humans in favor of others.

I hope this doesn't descend into a US freedoms versus someone elses freedoms because there is no universal set of freedoms humans need (other than things like food, shelter, air, etc).

The UN list includes basic freedoms of life, liberty, freedom of movement, legal recourse and equality before the law. They also include a number of freedoms that justify cryptography and the right to not be forced to reveal your keys:

• the right to presumption of innocence til proven guilty
• the right to appeal a conviction
• the right to be recognized as a person before the law
• the right to privacy and protection of that privacy by law
• freedom of thought, conscience, and religion
• freedom of opinion and expression
• freedom of assembly and association

Basically you can limit anything people can do without forever. But that goes against what freedom stands for. In the end countries have to make choices. And I doubt that any one (say France's versus the US versus Japan) are better than any other.

More pragmatically, allowing people near-unlimited personal freedom to try and fail clearly is a successful model. If my actions do no material harm to others, why restrict my freedom?

I hope this doesn't descend into a US freedoms versus someone elses freedoms because there is no universal set of freedoms humans need (other than things like food, shelter, air, etc).

The UN list includes basic freedoms of life, liberty, freedom of movement, legal recourse and equality before the law. They also include a number of freedoms that justify cryptography and the right to not be forced to reveal your keys:

• the right to presumption of innocence til proven guilty
• the right to appeal a conviction
• the right to be recognized as a person before the law
• the right to privacy and protection of that privacy by law
• freedom of thought, conscience, and religion
• freedom of opinion and expression
• freedom of assembly and association

Basically you can limit anything people can do without forever. But that goes against what freedom stands for. In the end countries have to make choices. And I doubt that any one (say France's versus the US versus Japan) are better than any other.

More pragmatically, allowing people near-unlimited personal freedom to try and fail clearly is a successful model. If my actions do no material harm to others, why restrict my freedom?

If you can get a child to agree that those rights are basically acceptable... then you might not stop them MP3 trading. But they'll certainly have a sense of right and wrong. As for whether MP3 trading should be banned, Article 17 states:

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

and that's about all that it has to say on the topic. The reason why MP3 trading is such a difficult one is that it really isn't clear whether one is doing harm or not. If, when you find a song you like, you then go out and buy the CD, then it seems that you didn't do harm to the record company... so they don't lose their livelihoods because you copied an MP3. If you're trading MP3s that (horrors) aren't copyrighted to any record label, then it probably comes under free speech.

For myself, I think I'd rather give a child the ability to feel their way through the rights and wrongs of that sort of problem than simply parrot the corporate line ("IP is all! Copying is Stealing! Napster is Communism!")... but hey. As a UK citizen I have to say that this is only the latest in a long string of idiotic policies from our alleged leaders and as such not surprising.

Executing people, even retarted, is against Human Rights

This misunderstanding of human rights is actually quite symptomatic of this age. Human rights are not a universal concept. A person has as many rights as the law of the land grants him, no less and no more. In particular, the United Nation has a number of agreements on human rights, by which the states who signed them must abide.

Nowhere does it say that executing people is illegal. The Universal Declaration on Human Rights does grant a right to life; in particular, it says: "No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life." Notice the arbitrarily.

People always say these days "people have a right to this," "animals have a right to that." Bullshit! The only rights people have are the ones explicitly listed in legislative documents in effect.

I don't think anybody's arguing whether this is an effective technological system, other than the obvious arguments (stolen cards, spoofed cards, defective cards, etc.)

The argument here is about the horrible privacy violations this opens up.

Regardless of why they are doing it, it opens up the possibility of doing very nasty things they couldn't do nearly as easily without these cards.

It seems to pretty clearly violate Article 17 of the UN Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which India has signed and ratified and is thus subject to under international law.

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My once great ISP, Interlog, wrote a procmail script for filtering email at the shell level. It's beautiful! It came pre-configured for a certain number of domains or addresses, and if you got another SPAM through your account, all you had to do was go into the shell and edit the .spamrc file.

Or The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

(The latter is signed by all countries in the world,... except USA and Somalia)

A country that executes children should be very careful when it comes to condemning others.

(That said I'd still prefer to live in the US, rather than China or Iraq...)

Or The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

(The latter is signed by all countries in the world,... except USA and Somalia)

A country that executes children should be very careful when it comes to condemning others.

(That said I'd still prefer to live in the US, rather than China or Iraq...)

Isn't executing juveniles a violation of human rights as well? Yes I thought so:

5.Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age and shall not be carried out on pregnant women.


Yet, in 24 US states people can be sentenced to death for crimes committed when they were children.

And look, my favorite country, Finland, has found its way on Amnesty pages as well.

"Holier than thou" attitude gets you nowhere. We all have room for improvement, not just China.

Visit:

United Nations Agreements on Human Rights


Amnesty International


"An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of human life. Morality is never upheld by legalized murder."

I try to avoid the practice of obfuscating or protecting my e-mail address, on the grounds that there are better ways to protect yourself from spam. Hiding your e-mail address is just dodging the main issue. No matter how much you hide it, they will get your address. You'll have to put up sooner or later.

Here's what I do to avoid e-mail spam. I think these steps work rather well. My e-mail address is publicized on slashdot, my home page, Usenet archives, and various other places, and yet I get very little spam (once a month at most, never more than once from the same place).

1. Subscribe to the Realtime Blackhole List to dodge known spam hosts.
2. Use the Spam Bouncer to filter out all the spam that the author of the program knows about (which is quite a lot; 200 kb of filters at last count), and send simulated bounce messages back to the spammers.
3. Run blackmail over sendmail to block relays and allow for additional manual filtering (e.g. if Netscape, Microsoft, or some loser sends me unwanted mail, they're not ever mailing me again :)