SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - This is repulsive [politics]

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BTW, as I said in other threads, and up in this one, we should have declared war on AQ, allied terrorist organizations, and any nation abetting them back in late 2001 (when it would have sailed through with 100% support ('cept maybe some idiots like Maxine Waters)).

This was a major failure of the Bush Administration, and the Congressional leadership, IMO.

It would have clarified so many things and it would have been the right thing to do.

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Originally Posted by mookiemookie (Post 1537602)

I think it's better to address the argument than to sling mud at the person making it. Even if someone's being a hypocrite, it's still better to take the high road. It's hard to do, but it's something we should aspire to.

I thought I was giving him an opportunity to explain the apparent contradiction. Instead he chooses to act offended and you choose to support the contradiction. Oh well.

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Originally Posted by August (Post 1537606)

I thought I was giving him an opportunity to explain the apparent contradiction. Instead he chooses to act offended and you choose to support the contradiction. Oh well.

I didn't support anything. I said that I think it's best that we avoid ad hominem fallacies and actually address the points of the argument being made. You don't seem to agree. That says a lot about you.

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As for his confession, he was not waterboarded. The other enhanced interrogation techniques are not even close to waterboarding—which is the only EIT that you can even make an argument is torture.

Same old rubbish with you trying to justify the unjustifiable, its a really simple matter tater. If the US calls it torture when other countries do it then its torture when they do it.
Besides which he was held first by Pakistan and then in secret prisons so your saying anything about what methods may have been used either on him or on any of the others whose testimony was refused means absolutely nothing as on top of trying to justify the unjustifiable to are attempting to justify things you don't even know about.

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What a novel concept, a state declaring a war on a non state actor.
How exactly would that work?
Allied terrorist organisations and any nation abetting......wouldn't that mean the US had to declare war on itself?

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I thought I was giving him an opportunity to explain the apparent contradiction.

You are going to end up as a member on Skys ignore list:rotfl2:

Yeah such a war declaration would indeed be novel, but it's a novel war. Coming up with a formal declaration is clearly superior to waging war with no declaration.

As for water boarding, this guy wasn't, and I don't think he even claims he was. As for the pakis, what they do is not my problem.

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Originally Posted by mookiemookie (Post 1537613)

I didn't support anything. I said that I think it's best that we avoid ad hominem fallacies and actually address the points of the argument being made. You don't seem to agree. That says a lot about you.

So your way of pointing out my ad hominem attack is by making your own?

I'll quote myself seeing as how you ignored it:

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All I wanted to know was how his willingness to murder innocent people jibes with his demand that we afford our enemies the standards and protections we afford our own citizens

Now either it does or it doesn't jibe but i'd rather have Skybird make his own arguments instead of you trying (and failing) to make them for him.

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Yeah such a war declaration would indeed be novel, but it's a novel war.

What on earth makes this terrorism any different from a hundred years of terrorism?

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As for the pakis,

pakis eh....classy.

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what they do is not my problem.

Errrrr....what they and others do is a major part of the problem just as much as what the CIA does is a major part of the problem, which is why you should be happy that any conviction at all was gained as its the long running habit of ignoring legal problems that has been the key element of the farce
Funnily enough its the reason why you are sitting there moaning about the outcome as you support the stupidity that leads to the outcome you are moaning about.

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Originally Posted by August (Post 1537677)

ow either it does or it doesn't jibe but i'd rather have Skybird make his own arguments instead of you trying (and failing) to make them for him.

You're skewing the argument away from the subject at hand (how to prosecute terrorists/enemy combatants) and making it about Skybird. I called you out on it. Deal with it.

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Originally Posted by mookiemookie (Post 1537693)

You're skewing the argument away from the subject at hand (how to prosecute terrorists/enemy combatants) and making it about Skybird. I called you out on it. Deal with it.

Yeah whatever.

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Originally Posted by FIREWALL (Post 1537462)

I go along with you Aramike. :yep: What is the best method that most Americans can live with ?

I made my suggestion. What do you think?

Great stuff by Andy McCarthy (who knows more than a little about trying terrorists in civilian court):

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Obama officials are now complaining about “torture.” Their spin
today is that we were lucky to get the one conviction we got given that the
Bush administration abused the defendant, resulting in the suppression of
evidence. Of course, this does not match up with statements they’ve been
making for months, expressing complete confidence in their ability to get a
just result. Nor does it jibe with the facts that this case was indicted years
before there was a 9/11 or a Bush administration, and that the government in
2001 managed to get sweeping convictions against four terrorists based on
the case as it existed in 1999.

The brute fact here is that DOJ got unlucky. Jury selection is tricky, and
prosecutors ended up with a bad juror who refused to deal rationally with the
evidence. When that happens, you either get a mistrial or the jurors
compromise in a way that can be unsavory. That is not the Bush
administration’s fault.

Speaking of unsavory, though, the Obama Justice Department took a
calculated risk, they’ve gotten burned on it, and it’s scape-goating to try to
shift the spotlight to the Bush counterterrorism tactics. Judge Lewis Kaplan’s
pretrial ruling, denying prosecutors the ability to call a key witness (who sold
Ghailani TNT), was very questionable. The Justice Department could have
appealed it, but elected not to. DOJ decided to roll the dice with what was left
of the case.

That they lost does not necessarily mean it was a bad gamble. The case they
put on clearly persuaded most of the jurors, and who knows whether the TNT
witness would have brought the loopy juror around? But let’s face it: in opting
against appeal, the Justice Department left itself vulnerable to the claim that
it failed to do everything it could have done to try to bring its best case.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling might have been upheld, but that’s anything but clear.
Ghailani was not tortured by the CIA – in fact, he wasn’t even water-boarded.
He was surely coerced in an aggressive way that would have made his
confession inadmissible. But there’s a big difference between using a coerced
confession against someone (which was not done) and calling a witness the
government learns about by coercion. The witness’s testimony is not scripted
by the confession – the witness has to come to court separately, provide
information from his perspective (not the defendant’s), be subjected to cross
examination, etc. Plus, even if you think the CIA’s tactics (whatever they
were) went too far, Ghailani was later interviewed by the FBI and repeated
the same information, under gentler questioning.

Judge Kaplan assumed that the alien terrorist had a Fifth Amendment
privilege, and the Obama administration does not seem to have contested
that assumption. This led the judge to conclude that the “fruit of the
poisonous tree” doctrine applied. To permit the witness’s testimony, Kaplan
reasoned, would violate Ghailani’s purported Fifth Amendment rights – i.e.,
evidence traceable to the CIA’s interrogation would be introduced against
him. But there was nothing “poisonous” about what the CIA did – they were
not rogue cops kicking down an American citizen’s door without a warrant;
they were gathering life-saving intelligence from a foreign enemy during
wartime. And, again, a witness’s testimony is not really the “fruit” of that
tree; it is related but independent in a way the substance of the confession is not.

I think the administration should have appealed and should not have
conceded Ghailani full Fifth Amendment protection. But reasonable minds can
differ, including about whether the appeal would have been successful,
whether further delay would have damaged the case (given the difficulty of
getting testimony from Kenya and Tanzania about events that happened a
dozen years ago), and whether even a successful appeal and the TNT
witness’s testimony would have made a difference to the juror who needed
convincing. Americans would have a lot more respect for the Obama
administration if it forthrightly explained the difficult choices it had to make
rather than dragged out that grating retread: It’s all Bush’s fault.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...-andy-mccarthy

McCarthy also says the guy is gonna spend life in prison for that one count, and that some on the right are accusing Holder of stuff he had nothing to do with (the indictment was handed down before 911, after all).

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the government in
2001 managed to get sweeping convictions against four terrorists based on
the case as it existed in 1999.

Thats the main point of it all, it was easier to btring people to justice before some idiots tried to take shortcuts under the illusion that it would make it easier.
Worldwide there are terrorists simply walking free from court because either the evidence has become screwed by the short cuts some fools introduced, or because the government simply refuses to show the evidence.

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Originally Posted by Ducimus (Post 1536706)

Unfortunately this is true. At least I think it is. I know this is waxing philosophical, but terrorism in general, is brought about from a belief or ideal of some whackjob or another. Your not going to kill an idea with bullets. Kill one terrorist, another will just take his place.

So long as we treat or react to these criminals like their a sovereign nation instead of the unique type of thugs that they are, we will always be in a perpetual state of war, forever. I can't help but wonder who profits from that. :hmmm:

I could not agree more Ducimus. Trying to defeat terrorism is like trying to remove cockroaches from the entire earth. It's not going to happen. However, it is possible to control a population of cockroaches in your home and that's how we need to look at this. I'm a strong beleiver in a good offense, but in this case, stomping on them won't fix the problem. The best approach for us is to defend our borders best we can and keep as many as possible from entering the country and invest more in intelligence.

Trying to remove terrorism is like trying to extinguish crimes.

There MUST be a system put up and NOT anarchy to handle the issue.