Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Your country labelled itself as being at war. Your leaders did. Your troops did. the events equal those in war.
And you counter with an unimportant bean-counting formality, like a bureaucrat?  Should I really take that serious?
P.S. The wars that are not wars. The torture that is not torture. The defeat that is not a defeat. Well, I see patterns emerging there. Cognitive Dissonance Theory, anyone?  |
So the actual rule of law should mean nothing because some bureaucrat, from the president on down, says so? Well - if that is the way you want to look at it - then ok. But then that means all the griping about "torture" need to be dropped because - after all - the "legality" doesn't matter. Either the rule of law holds or it doesn't. You can't claim that it doesn't one moment, then that it does the next - just because the yes or no side promotes or supports your viewpoint.
The Law of the Land says Congress must DECLARE War. It also defines very clearly how that must occur. That has not happened yet. Various laws and treaties state that torture is illegal. The definition of torture is interpreted differently by various people in what it allows and does not allow. Because there is no clearly defined "this is, this isn't" standard, there is debate on the topic.
You accuse me of using a politicians answer - I simply stand on what the Constitution states. You bring up Bush and 9/11 - look at 1941. Roosevelt gave his speech in which he said that a State of War existed between the US and Japan. Then what happened? Congress VOTED to declare war on Japan. Roosevelt saying it didn't make it legal - Congress did. Bush said a lot of things, and not every one of them was accurate. No "high treason" conspiracy theory there.
Ultimately this is simply a question of are you willing to bypass what the law says to follow the rest of society in blind acceptance of what the politicians tell you? Or are you willing to stand up and say "Hey, that isn't what the Constitution says". Since your not in the US or a US citizen, I can't expect you to have the same dedication to the foundation of our Nation. But don't for a minute think that such dedication is simply "politics as usual" on my part.
I can admit we have had abject failures in the conflicts we have been involved in. It has nothing to do with avoiding admitting "defeat". It has to do with being accurate and holding to the actual principals of this nation and its laws. If our politicians did that, then we wouldn't be having this discussion, because the conflicts would have been drastically different.