Are you honestly suggesting that any of these categories (employment, standard of living for the poor, health care)
are better in China than in the US? If you are, you're pretty dumb.
Vast portions of China's population live at standards that would not have been out of place one thousand years ago,
while even the poor in the US have cars, televisions, refrigerators, and what have you.
Vast portions of the Chinese population never see a doctor in their life unless they have the misfortune to be picked
for mandatory sterilization to meet some quota.
And as for employment, when even the employed in China barely survive in many regions, what, pray tell, is your
point?
On the contrary, the settlements represent a small fraction of the number of Jews who
were expelled from the West Bank when Jordan conquered it in 1948. Indeed, there's a
bizarre doouble standard going on here. When the Nazis declared that no jews were
allowed to live in the Reich, they called this judenrein, and everyone acknowledges
that this was an atrocity. When the South Africans declared that no blacks were allowed
to live in large parts of the country, they called this apartheid, and everyone
acknowledges that this was an atrocity. But when Arafat declares that no Jews are to
be allowed to live in the West Bank, you have no problem with this.
This is, of course, a marked contrast to the lives of those Palestinians who live within
Israel -- they are first class citizens, with all the rights of any other citizen.
Pretty clearly, you didn't bother to read the precedent (linked by joshki above, via my journal).
In 1942, the German SS landed two teams of commandoes onto the shores of Long Island and Florida,
from submarines, with instructions to blow up power plants, Jewish-owned businesses, and other
civilian targets. One of those landed was a US citizen who had returned to Germany in 1939 to
fight for Hitler's Reich.
Fortunately, these commandoes were caught before they succeeded in blowing anything up. By your
definition, since they were not fighting _at the moment they were caught_, they weren't combattants.
Needless to say, this is not what the Supreme Court ruled.
Similarly, Mr. al-Muhajir enterred the nation in order to commit an act of war. This makes him a
combattant -- there is no need to wait for him to actually explode a radiation device in a major
US city before he gains this status. There's nothing new in this practice, as discussed extensively
elsewhere in this thread.
Quite right. If you moved into my house and kicked me out and then said that some mythical spirit told you it was okay I don't think I'd be too impressed either.
This is slander, pure and simple, for two reasons. First off, no one `moved into' the region at all -- at the time of the foundation of Israel in 1948, the area which became Israel was 85% Jewish, and had been for centuries. Second, no one was `kicked out', either -- those Palestinians who chose to become citizens of the new state of Israel have all of the rights of any other Israeli citizen, and indeed there were 17 Palestinian members of Israel's parliament (the Knesset) last I checked. This is a marked contrast to the Arab states, almost all of which expelled their entire Jewish populations when Israel was founded.
And yet the Israelis manage to keep ahead on the death score.
More slander. Even Arafat himself
now admits that the lurid claims of massacres by the Israelis which he and the European press made earlier this year were simply not true. At Jenin, for example, only 53 died, by Arafat's own numbers, and almost all of those were combatants. Hamas'
report of the fighting at Jenin, as told to the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram confirms that those who were killed by the Israelis were combatants who died in battle.
Hardly. Radical Muslims/Christian/Jews etc can all away and fuck themselves. Spending your life trying to act like characters in a badly-written fairy story is not going to get my sympathy any time soon. However, acting in such a way as to appease on such retarded group (Israelis) is bound to stir up trouble with their equally retarded foes (Palestinians). And for what? So that they can go on deluding themselves? Why bother?
What nonsense. Only one side is making claims based on religious or racial rights here, the Arabs, who teach (in the schools of the PA and all Arab nations) that Jews are subhuman and should be destroyed. In contrast, Israel is a modern democracy with equal rights for all races and religions, which is trying to defend itself against maniacal attackers who slaughter civilians to acheive their ends.
The rest of your post dissolves into even more incoherent claims. You'll have to forgive me if I don't take such slander too seriously.
What does make him different is that he's recruiting from a population who see their "brothers" being shot by Israeli troops in US made tanks with US made guns calling in US made aircraft for support.
This attempt to blame Israel for bin Laden is no different from those who attempt to blame the US -- the two basic flaws in this argument are as follows:
First off, the only thing Israel is doing which is infuriating to the Islamist radicals is existing at all. Time after time, Israel has met every demand made by the Palestinian leadership, only to be met with a fresh wave of murder-suicide bombings, and a fresh wave of demands. Time after time, the Palestinian leaders have told their own people that they will not be satisfied until all of Israel is theirs -- indeed the only difference between Arafat and the leadership of Hamas and Hizbollah is that Arafat occasionally says something different in English, while saying the same old things in Arabic.
Second, central to your argument here is the idea that we should be setting our foreign policy not based on what is right or just, but on what will appease the radical Islamists, what will (allegedly) placate madmen like Mr. bin Laden and his followers. Do you really believe this? If so, perhaps the mistakes at Munich have not been completely realized by your generation of Englishmen...
Well, New York has close ties with a specific group (the IRA) which killed 2000+ of our (UK) citizens. Should the Prime Minister send the troops into the Bronx?
If you had credible evidence of state sponsorship of terrorism here which posed an immediate threat to Great Britain, and there were no other means to solve the problem, that would indeed be an acceptable solution under international law. That isn't the case, though, and even the description you give, is at best extremely stretched.
What proof is there that Iraq is a threat to the US?
You can start with the testimony of
David A. Kay and Richard Spertzel, both former heads of the
UN weapons inspections program in Iraq, on the state of Mr. Hussein's weapons programs.
But you seem to think that it's okay if Mr. Hussein has a nuke, since you think he won't use it. What you miss is that he doesn't need to use it himself to be a danger to us -- he has demonstrated links to al Qaeda, and could arm them with such a weapon while maintaining enough deniability to make deterrence useless, and more importantly, you miss that this is not a man with a history of rational behavior. You may be content when all that stands between us and the nuking of one of our cities is Mr. Hussein's tenuous grip on sanity, but I will not, and thus am not willing to see it get to that point.
September 11 happened _because_ of the US oil-based middle-east policy.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing. This is not why Mr. bin Laden says he attacked us -- he states that his grievance is with the nature of our society and with a string of perceived grievances stretching back over five hundred years. But perhaps you know something about his motivations that he does not?
China has indeed, according to your own CIA, supplied arms to "terrorist nations", as you like to call them.
While it is true that China has served as an arsenal for some remarkably nasty states, it is not nearly the immediate threat that Iraq is. In contrast to China, Iraq has close ties to the specific groups which already murdered 3,000 of our citizens a year and two days ago (and more before that), and is working to provide them with some very nasty weapons of mass destruction.
Not that I disagree with your idea that we should be tougher on China, but right now we have bigger fish to fry.
I support the Palestinians. So would you if you cared to open your eyes [electronicintifada.net]
Of course, considering that your sig links to a site which calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and which celebrates murder-suicide bombings, I suppose no one here expects a well-reasoned position from you.
Your missing one ingredient of the Bush Doctrine: are they actively arming and financing or likely to actively arm and finance attacks on us or our allies?
We've long since said that we will go to war to defend Taiwan, if need be. If we have any reason to believe that China's nukes are likely to end up in the hands of al-Qaeda, that would be a cause for action as well.
Oil, as anyone who saw what I saw in downtown Manhattan a year and a day ago could tell you, has nothing to do with it.
More pointedly, if government were the source of values, then no one government could be any better or worse than any other, as dictatorship would be `right' if that's what was now in power, and democracy would be `right' when it was in power. There would be no point in voting in any election, as whichever candidate won would magically become `right'.
I think everyone else reading this thread can see what a load of nonsense that idea is...
The other AC's reply gives a good example of what's wrong with your thinking, but more generally, your argument is basically flawed.
You argue that government is the source of all values, but if that were the case, we would never have grounds to object to anything that government does, no? So I guess we'll never hear you complain about DMCA, or any other law you don't like -- since in your weird world-view where government is the source of values, it is you who are wrong if you don't like something the government does.
More generally, your argument falls into a maze of self-contradiction. Was slavery `right' until the civil war, and then it magically became `wrong'? What about all those people who fought to outlaw slavery? Were they misguided lunatics before the civil war who magically became visionaries afterward? What a line of bull...
No, your arguement here is one of those ideas that is, to paraphrase George Orwell, so dumb that only an intellectual could believe it.
You are arguing that because `those people' were brought up in `that culture over there', they don't deserve the same freedoms as people brought up over here.
No, some values are, in fact, universal -- for example, slavery is objectively wrong despite the fact that every culture on earth has practiced it at some point in history, and despite the fact that some still do.
You misunderstand what rights are. Rights aren't brought to you by government, they are intrinsic and universal. Banning free speech in China does not make censorship acceptable any more than legalizing slavery in the past (and present in states like the Sudan) makes slavery acceptable.
Whether or not censorship is wrong is completely independent of whether it is legal. Values such as liberty and free speech are universal -- they don't depend on what laws happen to have been passed at the moment.
To quote, for those who don't wish to register for the Telegraph:
A CHINESE county has been ordered to conduct 20,000 abortions and sterilisations before the end of the year after communist family planning chiefs found that the official one-child policy was being routinely flouted.
The impoverished mountainous region of Huaiji has been set the draconian target by provincial authorities in Guangdong (formerly known as Canton).
...
Many of the terminations will have to be conducted forcibly on peasant women to meet the quota. As part of the campaign, county officials are buying expensive ultrasound equipment that can be carried to remote villages by car.
By detecting which women are pregnant, the machines will allow Government doctors to order terminations on the spot.
At the Huaiji county hospital, where most of the operations will take place, it is not only women with unauthorised pregnancies who are facing traumatic surgery in insanitary conditions.
Officials said that, as part of the drive to meet the quota, doctors had been ordered to sterilise women as soon as they gave birth after officially approved pregnancies.
With due respect, if you haven't heard the administration say what the
aims of this war are, you haven't been listening at all. The administration
has been crystal clear about what our goals are, most notably in speeches
on September 20, 2001, in the state of the Union, in speeches last month at
West point and the VFW, this very morning and evening, and dozens of other
times through the spring and summer.
We are fighting to dismantle a specific network of terrorists which has
attacked us in the name of their twisted ideology, and to deter or dethrone those states who are developing
weapons of mass destruction which could make their next attack many times more deadly than
those attacks we have already suffered:. As very clearly
specified in the Bush Doctrine, we are doing so as an exertion of our
national right to self defense, both active and anticipatory. This is not
the first time the US has been forced into such a war, and as much as we
may wish it to be, it may not, be the last time.
Now it's easy for you to sit in your chair, and pretend that this war is
`never ending' or is about `perpetual war', but only an idiot could believe
that these, rather than what I saw in downtown Manhattan with my own eyes
a year ago today are the reason we fight.
First off, you do your case no credit by citing Orwell as you do -- he himself
was a strong advocate of war as the proper response to forces like those who we face today,
and was wounded, nearly mortally, in Spain backing that ideal up with action.
Second, the majority of the wars the US has fought have not been declared wars, and not all
have been against state actors. Jefferson himself (lest you claim that this is not what
the founders intended) fought an undeclared war against a shadowy international terrorist
group not unlike the one we fight now -- the Barbary pirates of North Africa.
Finally, scare stories (`what if the evidence against al-Muhajir is fabricated') don't help
you case. His designation as a combatant is subject to judicial review, and his lawyers
are making the case against this designation in a Manhattan courtroom right now. A judge will
rule, and if it is found that there is not sufficient evidence to consider him a combatant,
he will be remanded to civilian custody.
This is how prisoners of war are held, and always have been. Just
as enemy prisoners in the second world war were not put in touch
with hundreds of thousands of defense lawyers for millions of
trials, prisoners of war in this war will not be either. Your attempt to
portray this as something new or strange is absurd.
And the answer to that answer is that as in all times in this nations
history, those who are captured while waging war against the nation are
held as prisoners of war. Unlike any other nation on earth, by the way,
if they are citizens, this designation is subject to judicial review.
If Mr. al-Muhajir was not waging war on the US, he will be remanded to
the justice department by a civilian judge at the end of his current hearing.
If he was was waging war, he will be treated as a prisoner of war -- or did
you think that when our brave men stormed up the cliffs on D-Day they read
a Miranda warning to the Germans at the top and put them in touch with
defense lawyers?
Mind you, your other comments give away your actual agenda here. Of course
I am aware that there are those in the world who view our ideals and our
actions with contempt. As I said, the American government is not responsible
to them, it is responsible to the American people, and that means that defending
the American people is a higher priority than kowtowing to European appeasers
or third-world tyrants.
Times have changed. European-ness envy is no longer the guiding principal of
American foreign policy.
Certainly. Mr. al-Muhajir is even now appealing in a Manhattan courtroom, with counsel, his designation
as an enemy combatant. The judge in that appeal will be shown the (classified) evidence justifying his
detention, and if the judge rules that he is not a combatant, then he will be remanded to the
Justice department, for civilian arraignment or release.
However, as long as he is held to be a combatant, he is a prisoner of war, and can be held until the end
of hostilities if need be, just as those soldiers who fought against us overseas can be. He can also
(as will likely happen) be tried for his violations of the law of war (taking up arms against us under
cover of civilian garb, infiltration of civilian areas with the intent of committing an act of war),
under military jurisdiction. If thus tried, he is entitled to the full protections of military law,
just as would be an American soldier charged with a crime.
This is the same as anyone caught in battle, here or abroad.
So you think you've lost rights you had before if people voluntarily cooperate with
law enforcement? I don't buy it.
It's quite simple, really -- either we have, or we haven't lost rights since September 11, 2001.
I posit that we have not. If you want to convince anyone that we have lost rights since
then, you will have to give an example of a right you feel you've lost, no?
As for Abdullah al-Muhajir (why do you call him Jose Padilla? Do you call Muhammad Ali `Cassius Clay'?)
he is being detained as an enemy combatant, according to procedures which have been used since the
earliest days of our republic, and which have been repeatedly ruled Constitutional, most recently in
the 1942 case Ex Parte Quirin.
Why can't we? We could, if we felt that that would adequately protect
America's citizens. However, as practiced since the earliest days of this republic,
and upheld by the supreme court, when trying someone for taking up arms against the
United States in an act of war (as opposed to murder, for which McVeigh was tried),
military jurisdiction is used.
Think of it of the triumph of common sense (and yes, the rule of law) over irrational paranoia and civil-liberties
scare-mongering.
With due respect, none of these powers are `new', by `fiat' or otherwise -- if
you had read the thread, you would know that all of this was upheld in 1942, in
a case which in no way depends on a declared state of war.
If you think you can only be an enemy combatant if a state of war exists already,
does this mean that you think that any Japanese pilot who had been captured during
the attack on Pearl Harbor would have to be released, since we did not declare war
on Japan until after the attack?
As for `the rest of the world', the US government is not responsible to `the rest
of the world' to defend America's citizens, they are responsible to those citizens.
That means that our national defense comes before stroking European egos or appeasing
third-world dictators. Deal.
True, because it was determined to not be worth demonstrating that Mr. McVeigh
had violated the laws of war or taken up arms against us in contravention of the
laws of war. Had these things been the case (as they were in the case of Mr.
al-Muhajir, they might have taken this tack instead.
Umm, hello? He's not innocent or guilty, he's a prisoner of war, a combatant who is being
detained. Or did you think that when our brave men stormed up the cliffs at Normandy, they
read the Germans at the top their Miranda rights and put them in touch with their lawyers?
Please actually read the citation provided, as well as the link to the Supreme Court
case Ex Parte Quirin which joshki provided above. Judicial review of the designation
of a suspect as an enemy combatant is available (Mr. al-Muhajir is appealing his designation
as a combatant in a Manhattan courtroom right now), but those who are enemy combatants can
be detained as needed.
What you describe sure sounds abusive, but if it was illegal before September 11, 2001 (which
it was, if this is a fair description of what happened), it's illegal now. There's certainly
nothing in USA PATRIOT which could even loosely be described as permitting what you describe.
So yes, abuses by police officers will happen, and I'll be the first to say that the DEA has been
guilty of some pretty nasty abuses in some areas, but as you yourself say, this isn't something
new, nor has the legal standing of any of this changed.
You want my advice? Assuming this is not a troll, put a copy of the letter you said you received
up where people can see it, and get the Institute for Justice on the phone,
see if they'll take your case, and if you're in the western US, consider the
Mountain States Legal Foundation as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you honestly suggesting that any of these categories (employment, standard of living for the poor, health care) are better in China than in the US? If you are, you're pretty dumb.
Vast portions of China's population live at standards that would not have been out of place one thousand years ago, while even the poor in the US have cars, televisions, refrigerators, and what have you.
Vast portions of the Chinese population never see a doctor in their life unless they have the misfortune to be picked for mandatory sterilization to meet some quota.
And as for employment, when even the employed in China barely survive in many regions, what, pray tell, is your point?
This is, of course, a marked contrast to the lives of those Palestinians who live within Israel -- they are first class citizens, with all the rights of any other citizen.
In 1942, the German SS landed two teams of commandoes onto the shores of Long Island and Florida, from submarines, with instructions to blow up power plants, Jewish-owned businesses, and other civilian targets. One of those landed was a US citizen who had returned to Germany in 1939 to fight for Hitler's Reich.
Fortunately, these commandoes were caught before they succeeded in blowing anything up. By your definition, since they were not fighting _at the moment they were caught_, they weren't combattants. Needless to say, this is not what the Supreme Court ruled.
Similarly, Mr. al-Muhajir enterred the nation in order to commit an act of war. This makes him a combattant -- there is no need to wait for him to actually explode a radiation device in a major US city before he gains this status. There's nothing new in this practice, as discussed extensively elsewhere in this thread.
Quite right. If you moved into my house and kicked me out and then said that some mythical spirit told you it was okay I don't think I'd be too impressed either.
This is slander, pure and simple, for two reasons. First off, no one `moved into' the region at all -- at the time of the foundation of Israel in 1948, the area which became Israel was 85% Jewish, and had been for centuries. Second, no one was `kicked out', either -- those Palestinians who chose to become citizens of the new state of Israel have all of the rights of any other Israeli citizen, and indeed there were 17 Palestinian members of Israel's parliament (the Knesset) last I checked. This is a marked contrast to the Arab states, almost all of which expelled their entire Jewish populations when Israel was founded.
And yet the Israelis manage to keep ahead on the death score.
More slander. Even Arafat himself now admits that the lurid claims of massacres by the Israelis which he and the European press made earlier this year were simply not true. At Jenin, for example, only 53 died, by Arafat's own numbers, and almost all of those were combatants. Hamas' report of the fighting at Jenin, as told to the Egyptian weekly al-Ahram confirms that those who were killed by the Israelis were combatants who died in battle.
Hardly. Radical Muslims/Christian/Jews etc can all away and fuck themselves. Spending your life trying to act like characters in a badly-written fairy story is not going to get my sympathy any time soon. However, acting in such a way as to appease on such retarded group (Israelis) is bound to stir up trouble with their equally retarded foes (Palestinians). And for what? So that they can go on deluding themselves? Why bother?
What nonsense. Only one side is making claims based on religious or racial rights here, the Arabs, who teach (in the schools of the PA and all Arab nations) that Jews are subhuman and should be destroyed. In contrast, Israel is a modern democracy with equal rights for all races and religions, which is trying to defend itself against maniacal attackers who slaughter civilians to acheive their ends.
The rest of your post dissolves into even more incoherent claims. You'll have to forgive me if I don't take such slander too seriously.
What does make him different is that he's recruiting from a population who see their "brothers" being shot by Israeli troops in US made tanks with US made guns calling in US made aircraft for support.
This attempt to blame Israel for bin Laden is no different from those who attempt to blame the US -- the two basic flaws in this argument are as follows:
First off, the only thing Israel is doing which is infuriating to the Islamist radicals is existing at all. Time after time, Israel has met every demand made by the Palestinian leadership, only to be met with a fresh wave of murder-suicide bombings, and a fresh wave of demands. Time after time, the Palestinian leaders have told their own people that they will not be satisfied until all of Israel is theirs -- indeed the only difference between Arafat and the leadership of Hamas and Hizbollah is that Arafat occasionally says something different in English, while saying the same old things in Arabic.
Second, central to your argument here is the idea that we should be setting our foreign policy not based on what is right or just, but on what will appease the radical Islamists, what will (allegedly) placate madmen like Mr. bin Laden and his followers. Do you really believe this? If so, perhaps the mistakes at Munich have not been completely realized by your generation of Englishmen...
Well, New York has close ties with a specific group (the IRA) which killed 2000+ of our (UK) citizens. Should the Prime Minister send the troops into the Bronx?
If you had credible evidence of state sponsorship of terrorism here which posed an immediate threat to Great Britain, and there were no other means to solve the problem, that would indeed be an acceptable solution under international law. That isn't the case, though, and even the description you give, is at best extremely stretched.
What proof is there that Iraq is a threat to the US?
You can start with the testimony of David A. Kay and Richard Spertzel, both former heads of the UN weapons inspections program in Iraq, on the state of Mr. Hussein's weapons programs.
But you seem to think that it's okay if Mr. Hussein has a nuke, since you think he won't use it. What you miss is that he doesn't need to use it himself to be a danger to us -- he has demonstrated links to al Qaeda, and could arm them with such a weapon while maintaining enough deniability to make deterrence useless, and more importantly, you miss that this is not a man with a history of rational behavior. You may be content when all that stands between us and the nuking of one of our cities is Mr. Hussein's tenuous grip on sanity, but I will not, and thus am not willing to see it get to that point.
September 11 happened _because_ of the US oil-based middle-east policy.
Bzzzt, wrong answer, thanks for playing. This is not why Mr. bin Laden says he attacked us -- he states that his grievance is with the nature of our society and with a string of perceived grievances stretching back over five hundred years. But perhaps you know something about his motivations that he does not?
China has indeed, according to your own CIA, supplied arms to "terrorist nations", as you like to call them.
While it is true that China has served as an arsenal for some remarkably nasty states, it is not nearly the immediate threat that Iraq is. In contrast to China, Iraq has close ties to the specific groups which already murdered 3,000 of our citizens a year and two days ago (and more before that), and is working to provide them with some very nasty weapons of mass destruction.
Not that I disagree with your idea that we should be tougher on China, but right now we have bigger fish to fry.
I support the Palestinians. So would you if you cared to open your eyes [electronicintifada.net]
Of course, considering that your sig links to a site which calls Louis Farrakhan `wise' and `balanced', and which celebrates murder-suicide bombings, I suppose no one here expects a well-reasoned position from you.
We've long since said that we will go to war to defend Taiwan, if need be. If we have any reason to believe that China's nukes are likely to end up in the hands of al-Qaeda, that would be a cause for action as well.
Oil, as anyone who saw what I saw in downtown Manhattan a year and a day ago could tell you, has nothing to do with it.
I think everyone else reading this thread can see what a load of nonsense that idea is...
You argue that government is the source of all values, but if that were the case, we would never have grounds to object to anything that government does, no? So I guess we'll never hear you complain about DMCA, or any other law you don't like -- since in your weird world-view where government is the source of values, it is you who are wrong if you don't like something the government does.
More generally, your argument falls into a maze of self-contradiction. Was slavery `right' until the civil war, and then it magically became `wrong'? What about all those people who fought to outlaw slavery? Were they misguided lunatics before the civil war who magically became visionaries afterward? What a line of bull...
No, your arguement here is one of those ideas that is, to paraphrase George Orwell, so dumb that only an intellectual could believe it.
You are arguing that because `those people' were brought up in `that culture over there', they don't deserve the same freedoms as people brought up over here.
No, some values are, in fact, universal -- for example, slavery is objectively wrong despite the fact that every culture on earth has practiced it at some point in history, and despite the fact that some still do.
You misunderstand what rights are. Rights aren't brought to you by government, they are intrinsic and universal. Banning free speech in China does not make censorship acceptable any more than legalizing slavery in the past (and present in states like the Sudan) makes slavery acceptable.
Whether or not censorship is wrong is completely independent of whether it is legal. Values such as liberty and free speech are universal -- they don't depend on what laws happen to have been passed at the moment.
See (free registration required) or here.
With due respect, if you haven't heard the administration say what the aims of this war are, you haven't been listening at all. The administration has been crystal clear about what our goals are, most notably in speeches on September 20, 2001, in the state of the Union, in speeches last month at West point and the VFW, this very morning and evening, and dozens of other times through the spring and summer.
We are fighting to dismantle a specific network of terrorists which has attacked us in the name of their twisted ideology, and to deter or dethrone those states who are developing weapons of mass destruction which could make their next attack many times more deadly than those attacks we have already suffered:. As very clearly specified in the Bush Doctrine, we are doing so as an exertion of our national right to self defense, both active and anticipatory. This is not the first time the US has been forced into such a war, and as much as we may wish it to be, it may not, be the last time.
Now it's easy for you to sit in your chair, and pretend that this war is `never ending' or is about `perpetual war', but only an idiot could believe that these, rather than what I saw in downtown Manhattan with my own eyes a year ago today are the reason we fight.
Second, the majority of the wars the US has fought have not been declared wars, and not all have been against state actors. Jefferson himself (lest you claim that this is not what the founders intended) fought an undeclared war against a shadowy international terrorist group not unlike the one we fight now -- the Barbary pirates of North Africa.
Finally, scare stories (`what if the evidence against al-Muhajir is fabricated') don't help you case. His designation as a combatant is subject to judicial review, and his lawyers are making the case against this designation in a Manhattan courtroom right now. A judge will rule, and if it is found that there is not sufficient evidence to consider him a combatant, he will be remanded to civilian custody.
This is how prisoners of war are held, and always have been. Just as enemy prisoners in the second world war were not put in touch with hundreds of thousands of defense lawyers for millions of trials, prisoners of war in this war will not be either. Your attempt to portray this as something new or strange is absurd.
If Mr. al-Muhajir was not waging war on the US, he will be remanded to the justice department by a civilian judge at the end of his current hearing.
If he was was waging war, he will be treated as a prisoner of war -- or did you think that when our brave men stormed up the cliffs on D-Day they read a Miranda warning to the Germans at the top and put them in touch with defense lawyers?
Mind you, your other comments give away your actual agenda here. Of course I am aware that there are those in the world who view our ideals and our actions with contempt. As I said, the American government is not responsible to them, it is responsible to the American people, and that means that defending the American people is a higher priority than kowtowing to European appeasers or third-world tyrants.
Times have changed. European-ness envy is no longer the guiding principal of American foreign policy.
However, as long as he is held to be a combatant, he is a prisoner of war, and can be held until the end of hostilities if need be, just as those soldiers who fought against us overseas can be. He can also (as will likely happen) be tried for his violations of the law of war (taking up arms against us under cover of civilian garb, infiltration of civilian areas with the intent of committing an act of war), under military jurisdiction. If thus tried, he is entitled to the full protections of military law, just as would be an American soldier charged with a crime.
This is the same as anyone caught in battle, here or abroad.
It's quite simple, really -- either we have, or we haven't lost rights since September 11, 2001. I posit that we have not. If you want to convince anyone that we have lost rights since then, you will have to give an example of a right you feel you've lost, no?
As for Abdullah al-Muhajir (why do you call him Jose Padilla? Do you call Muhammad Ali `Cassius Clay'?) he is being detained as an enemy combatant, according to procedures which have been used since the earliest days of our republic, and which have been repeatedly ruled Constitutional, most recently in the 1942 case Ex Parte Quirin .
Think of it of the triumph of common sense (and yes, the rule of law) over irrational paranoia and civil-liberties scare-mongering.
If you think you can only be an enemy combatant if a state of war exists already, does this mean that you think that any Japanese pilot who had been captured during the attack on Pearl Harbor would have to be released, since we did not declare war on Japan until after the attack?
As for `the rest of the world', the US government is not responsible to `the rest of the world' to defend America's citizens, they are responsible to those citizens. That means that our national defense comes before stroking European egos or appeasing third-world dictators. Deal.
True, because it was determined to not be worth demonstrating that Mr. McVeigh had violated the laws of war or taken up arms against us in contravention of the laws of war. Had these things been the case (as they were in the case of Mr. al-Muhajir, they might have taken this tack instead.
Umm, hello? He's not innocent or guilty, he's a prisoner of war, a combatant who is being detained. Or did you think that when our brave men stormed up the cliffs at Normandy, they read the Germans at the top their Miranda rights and put them in touch with their lawyers?
Please actually read the citation provided, as well as the link to the Supreme Court case Ex Parte Quirin which joshki provided above. Judicial review of the designation of a suspect as an enemy combatant is available (Mr. al-Muhajir is appealing his designation as a combatant in a Manhattan courtroom right now), but those who are enemy combatants can be detained as needed.
So yes, abuses by police officers will happen, and I'll be the first to say that the DEA has been guilty of some pretty nasty abuses in some areas, but as you yourself say, this isn't something new, nor has the legal standing of any of this changed.
You want my advice? Assuming this is not a troll, put a copy of the letter you said you received up where people can see it, and get the Institute for Justice on the phone, see if they'll take your case, and if you're in the western US, consider the Mountain States Legal Foundation as well.