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interesting poointy and well educated comment. The geneva convention was not fully ratified until after WW2 in which before was the articles of war when it was seen that the league of nations had failed thus giving birth to the UN, which is also another failure.
As a soldier, I tell you, the geneva convention is forced on us and train on it. We even get scenarios to help us make descisions. Sometimes you just have about one second or less to make your decision and hope it was the best judgement that you could exercise. Aby Ghraib, that was a joke.....and well....I need to keep my mouth shut.
Nevertheless, is hard to know the truth when is only seen on TV and not live it in pure reality and gore. The Iraq you see in CNN is only a fraction of reality. I personally do not think it was all LOndons fault specially when all the officers got was demotion and loosing their commands
posted by
michael_pilarte
on June 8, 2005 at 10:29 AM
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That's the thing Uni...
Gitmo is in Cuba and has many prisoners in it from Sept 11th days that have yet to still be charged. They are not Iraqi. Our war isn't with Iraq, it's with Al Qaeda and the like...of course some of them are Iraqi insurgents...but it's not clear who the enemy is or what the rules are. They use Gitmo and the so called War on Terror as an excuse to do whatever they want to whoever they want in then name of terrorism and national security. That's a bit scary.
posted by
Temple
on June 7, 2005 at 2:14 PM
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Mary
So you in turn called ME on it =P. I went and consulted Dr. Ambrose about the German POW deaths, and he says the number I posted is based on a typographical error. That’s what I get for not going to him first. So the actual number is about 70,000 German POWs dead under our control. Certainly not 1 million, but still quite a few.
And as far as the law in this country is concerned, so long as we keep hanging at least one person responsible out to dry to take the blame, it should be made clear that the administration “doesn’t condone” such action, and it certainly shouldn’t be used as a precedent. My eyes hurt, I was up way too late last night =P
posted by
Unidentified_Hacker
on June 7, 2005 at 8:29 AM
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Temple!
Hi there =D
I heard someone from Amnesty International speaking on public radio yesterday, and I heard them mention the gulags and what not. I don’t know, I just have a hard time taking all of it seriously. It’s ok for our soldiers to kill God only knows how many thousands of Iraqis over there, but it’s not ok to treat them cruelly? I understand that they’re fighting what they think is wrong, and I guess they do have a better chance of changing something in the prisons than they do of ending a war. It just feels like they’re treating a symptom rather than treating the disease.
posted by
Unidentified_Hacker
on June 7, 2005 at 8:23 AM
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UH,
I've got to log off in a few minutes, but in the meantime, I'll read up on this: the effectiveness of the Geneva Convention, whether it has ever prevented gross abuses or it is merely a sop to public opinion. I did go over to Michael_Pilartes blog and ask for his insights. I'll check back with you in the morning.
posted by
Blanche.
on June 6, 2005 at 10:03 PM
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Unid'd Hacker,
Hmm, you would call me on it. I have no idea how effective the Geneva Convention is. I know how it's supposed to work in theory, and the nature of quid pro quo of people. If you're going to torture our prisoners, we'll torture yours worse!.....and so forth, escalating. Also, I did not know that 1 milllion Germans died in American captivity. I wonder if Scoop or others would know. I'm going to ask.
Temple is also right, the War on Terror is two-fold, foreign and domestic. I still say that it's equally important that the precedents set at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, don't become Standard Operating Procedure, not only because of further escalations with Iraq and American and European POWs, but because of setting precedent within US itself. If it's okay to torture and sadomasochistically humiliate a prisoner there, it's okay to do it here, it's a spiral. Law is set by precedent.
posted by
Blanche.
on June 6, 2005 at 9:27 PM
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Here's the real problem with the Geneva Convention now.
The current war is called the War on Terror. There is no defined enemy, it has not been a declared war in Congress, therefore, technically, even though everyone is running around screaming words like "war" and the "geneva convention" no one (them, whoever they may be, nor us) are under any legal obligation to apply the rules of the Geneva Convention. This was the intention of the Bush administration. The official war in Iraq was considered won, he developed his axis of evil, then it became blurry. Hence the reason Gitmo is now considered the gulags of our time by Amnesty International. Look that up. Look up AI's report. Look up what the Russians did in gulags. The GC doesn't touch it, it's just pure civil and humanitarian rights violations beyond that. Vets coming home from war now in Iraq are vets of the "War on Terror." A war that can't even technically exist. Worse than Vietnam, which was also never declared war, because we have no defined enemy. At least with Vietnam we knew our enemy and there were peace talks, they were able to try and talk the VC into applying the GC, which they did in some places and to certain degrees. Mostly not. But they let POWs come home. That isn't the case now. The GC does and has worked, always with exception, historically, within the boundaries of declared war. The problem is, our current adminstration believes itself to be above the system in place and is making it worse for our troops. It allows them to torture inmates at places like Abu Gharib and Guantamo. Sept. 11 has people in Gitmo that are held in Gitmo as part of the War on Terror. It's all very convenient.
By the way, hi. :)
posted by
Temple
on June 6, 2005 at 7:40 PM
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