Difference between revisions of "Talk:Lecture 14"

Revision as of 06:20, 1 December 2005

Geneva Conventions

Lazowska, repeating my email:

I feel that Bryan Del Monte presented an irresponsibly one-sided view of the Geneva Convention issue.

The question of whether the Geneva Convention should apply was the subject of considerable debate within the administration, with Colin Powell and his counsel losing the argument. See the PBS chronology here.

(Scan particularly for "January-February 2002 Bush administration's internal battle over Geneva Conventions.")

To present this as a clear-cut situation is intellectually dishonest and irresponsible.

It's not unlike presenting one-sided intelligence to the Congress, concealing the fact that there was in fact considerable debate and disagreement within the intelligence community.

The whole PBS coverage is rooted here.

Eye for an Eye

Chris Fleizach - I found it particularly disturbing in the "normative" debate section that there was a bullet point talking about what Al Qaeda does to our soldiers/civilians. I didn't realize America had started looking to Al Qaeda for it's moral and ethical lead. If America wants to be the global policeman then it must set a high standard of conduct, lest we have little to say to countries that practice abuse in the open. The fact that this point made it into the presentation presumably means that there has been a lot of serious discussion by the policy makers. As a nation "that does not commit torture," according to President Bush, this discussion should have been ended quickly. Instead, it seems it has curried at least some favor if the Department of Defense feels it's acceptable to present to this class as a potentiality.

Blame the Media

--Gmusick 22:19, 30 November 2005 (PST) I really liked the presentation by Christina, but I did get tired of hearing the old refrain of "it's the Media's fault" that our policies are misunderstood. Perhaps if the policies weren't totally formed in secrecy and marked "classified" then we wouldn't have so many misunderstandings about what is going on. And before somebody says it, there are plenty of examples of "the Media" doing really bad things or totally misrepresenting the situation. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, I am a former journalist for an itsy-bitsy weekly paper.

Redifining Combatants

Chris Fleizach - With the presidential directive that says America does not recognize Al Qaeda detainees as prisoners of war and that they don't apply to the Geneva convention because they haven't signed the document should cause anxiety for all U.S. citizens. It seems the only thing keeping the government from having the ability to detain and torture me is that I haven't been declared a terrorist, since I too have not signed the Geneva Convention. If I'm not tortured, I can still be held indefinetly without being charged. Jose Padilla "was" an American citizen until declared an enemy combatant. No one is saying he should be released, but as an American, should he receive the legal protections given to him in the Constitution? Apparently not, because he didn't sign the Geneva Convention. A similar situation happened with the sleeper cell supposedly busted in Buffalo, New York. The New York Times found that these citizens had attended Al Qaeda training schools, but didn't like the direction bin Laden was pushing at. One of them even notified the FBI afterwards to declare he had done so. The government, to great fanfare, announced a few weeks later that they had broken up a sleeper cell. At the time of the article, the men had been imprisoned without being charged for years.