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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. You can argue about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees are being treated fairly as prisoners of war, but they were caught fighting against Allied forces in a war zone. It's an absurd characterization to call them "kidnap victims."

And the U.S. does not recognize a "right to death" for anyone in the U.S. You can argue about that policy, but the Guantanamo detainees are not being treated inconsistently there. Our policies are strongly anti-suicide across the board. See: http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/guantanamo-is-not-an-an....

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Neither characterization is true. GTMO detainees weren't kidnapped, but there's little evidence to suggest that most of them were actual combatants.

It upsets me a little to see discussions about things like GTMO distracting themselves from the core issue. The problem isn't detention at GTMO, or drone strikes, or the citizenship status of targets. To engage yourself fully with any of those problems is to nibble around the edges of the real issue.

The problem is that in 2001, Congress issued a declaration of war (that's what the AUMF was) against an ideology. At the time, that might have seemed sensible; a way to take the threat of armed terrorism more seriously than we had. But the problem with it is obvious and it's something Obama is facing down now: you can't eradicate an ideology, which leaves us in a permanent state of war.

If we'd declared war against Afghanistan, the status of prisoners at GTMO would be clearer; we'd at some point declare the conflict over (we'd have to, because contra the Daily Kos left, the USG does not actually want to station hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Afghanistan) and the prisoners would be released.

To be fair, the AUMF was not a declaration of war against an ideology. It was a declaration of war against whichever specific non-state military groups planned and committed the September 11 attacks and anyone who harbored them. From the AUMF:

"(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

The AUMF refers to prevention of "future acts of international terrorism" but specifically authorizes force only against those who were involved with the 9/11 attacks.

"Those nations, organizations, or persons [...] planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks [...] or harbored such organizations or persons" describes an ideology.

The problematic word is "organizations". The most important lesson we should learn from the 2000s is "never allow the word 'organizations' (or any of its synonyms) to appear in an AUMF again". You can invade a nation, you can kill a person, but there's simply no clear definition of what it means to eradicate an organization.

> but they were caught fighting against Allied forces in a war zone.

Wow, that is incredibly misinformed. And even if it were true (it is not), it does not justify torture. Torture is always despicable, and there's a permanent moral stain on the nation that perpetrates torture, no matter who is being tortured. There is no excuse. No excuse.

Torture is despicable, but there is an ongoing debate about whether anything going on at Guantanamo (as opposed to Abu Ghraib) is actually torture under the international definitions. It's not a settled issue like you're making it out to be.

> there is an ongoing debate

Is this like the debate on climate change? Where 99.99% of the scientists agree it's man made, yet a few others think it's natural.

> It's not a settled issue like you're making it out to be.

Yeah, I think it's pretty much settled by everyone but the US government.

It seems pretty clear that torture did happen at/around GTMO, and that it ceased (modulo force feeding) under Obama.

I think this is why Mod Def decided to volunteer for this procedure.

He wanted to show us the degree to which it is or isn't torture.

The are not all guilty:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/former-s...

You, on the other hand, are guilty of providing moral support for this travesty.

Maybe they were caught on the battlefield, maybe they weren't.

These prisoners were tortured and deprived of habeas corpus. Without a fair trial it's fair to question anything regarding their detention. Seeing it as kidnapping seems quite reasonable.

That's fallacious reasoning. Just because they were treated wrongly in one way does not mean it becomes correct to mischaracterize "anything regarding their detention."

And Guantanamo prisoners are getting habeas petitions heard: http://ccrjustice.org/GTMOscorecard. It's not happening fast enough, and partly for logistical reasons (no U.S. state wants to host trials for them and foreign countries don't want them back), but it is happening.

Enemy combatants do not have habeas corpus rights and never have. When Allied forces captured German soldiers in World War II, they were not required to present them to a judge and those soldiers weren't sentenced; they were held until the conflict ended. If Allied forces accidentally rounded up German civilians in the process, those civilians could also expect indefinite detention.

In a world historical sense, such treatment is a mercy; in total war, the only alternative, of course, is to kill the detainees.

GTMO represents a great moral failing of the United States, but let's also not forget that the USG is the lesser of two culpable parties; the greater responsibility lies with an irregular army that deliberately exploits its civilian host population to conceal itself, relying on the fact that retaliation will inevitably harm more innocents than fighters. The Taliban isn't the Viet Cong. The cause of the Taliban and "Al Qaeda" (whatever that means) is a lost one, fueled entirely by an obscene willingness to see thousands of innocent people murdered solely prolong the inevitable.

Oh please.

1) Many (most) weren't "caught" doing anything, other than going about their business. The majority were kidnapped from airports.

2) "Allied forces"? We white. Them black. Therefore them bad. Try to see the world from a perspective other than your own.

3) "War zone" - no it wasn't. It became a warzone after most of those in Gitmo were disappeared. That's like saying that what happened to jewish people before WWII was fine because it became a war zone.

4) It's not a characterisation, it's exactly what it is, if you interpret the situation through the Geneva convention, which the US is inexplicably a party to.

1. Many of them were in fact armed combatants. A significant problem in securing the release of GTMO detainees is that they were handled so clumsily that it was difficult to sort out which detainees were victims of circumstance and which were violent. Several people released from GTMO have later been killed or captured in armed conflict with NATO forces.

2. By "allied" he meant "NATO". There are plenty of "black" people in NATO.

3. Afghanistan was in fact a war zone long before 2001. At its most orderly, under the brutal control of the Taliban, it was a loosely organized state embroiled in a civil war destined to produce a breakaway non-Pashto state. Also: the word "disappeared" means something specific, and you dilute that meaning by using it here. The "disappeared" of Central and South America are so named because they're never heard from again; they're often murdered by death squads.

4. Nothing in the Geneva Conventions speaks to the definition of "kidnapping".

"Several people released from GTMO have later been killed or captured in armed conflict with NATO forces."

I think few things would want to make me take up arms more against an invader than the false imprisonment of myself or my family at GTMO for said act.

> Several people released from GTMO have later been killed or captured in armed conflict with NATO forces.

So kidnapping people and torturing them makes you enemies? Who would have thought...

This glib sentiment ignores the reality that there are in fact thousands of armed militants in Afghanistan who will happily kill tens of innocent Afghanis on spec just for the prospect of killing a single NATO soldier, and that the vast majority of those militants have not been captured.

One needn't support GTMO, or even tolerate it, to acknowledge the fact that our adversaries in this conflict are both real and despicable.

They're not despicable. Just piteous, and angry, and at the guys who really screwed shit up for them - that's the US right now - used to be the USSR. The militants were borne out of these historic conflicts, and were largely armed by such. They will not go away through force. They cannot. It is ridiculous to think that one can resolve something through yet more of the very thing which instigated it. They can and will go away if their root cause, Imperialism, is no longer an issue. Currently, they seek to do this by force, and they're winning; the US I see today compared to that I knew and loved and lived in some 15 years ago bears precious little semblance. This could be resolved diplomatically, but only through tripartite talks between the Afghani government, the Taliban and the US.

Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?

Neither Russia nor the US forced militants to establish a despotic theocracy in Afghanistan dedicated to the facially ridiculous prospect of establishing an Islamic Caliphate that would run the middle east under medieval religious law, or to host a transnational irregular armed force dedicated to the delusional prospect of hastening that lost cause by targeting and murdering civilians abroad.

If you want to pursue a line of argument that leaves you sticking up for the Taliban, that's your prerogative, but I don't think doing so will strengthen any case you have to make about the US.

If you haven't seen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares, it's well worth a view.

The fact that the Taliban was a despicable force for evil doesn't moot the idea that politicians and demagogues in the US and Europe have exploited Islamaphobia, nor does it imply that the Taliban or Al Qaeda is a threat worthy of the degree of state machinery we've allocated to it.

None of these things are black and white.

Of course. One of the interesting aspects was the extent to which the west instigated and funded these organizations almost from inception.

1. Some, not many. The majority are noise. There is signal there, in terms of what The US are looking for most likely, but who knows in the abscence of any trial. Innocent until proven guilty. They weren't arrested. They weren't taken as POWs. Just abducted. Sorry, rendered.

2. I meant black and white from the polar point of view. Germany and Italy were allies.

3. Yup, but plenty of these guys ain't from the 'stans, and Afghanistan was self contained. The history of conflict in Afghanistan is long and bloody, and rarely bought about by Afghanis - usually empires looking for resources and an enviable bit of geography.

4. No, but it talks about the lawful taking and holding of POWs, which, operating outside of such, makes Guantanamo a criminal enterprise in international law, and it's actions therefore being nothing more than kidnapping.

QED.

Since we've apparently reached "QED", there's little point in continuing the discussion.

"Many of them were in fact armed combatants"

The US government has a tremendous credibility problem.

Its representatives make many claims, trying to spin the narrative in their favor. Some people seem to buy much of this narrative. They apparently believe the stories that governments, spy agencies, police, torturers, and PR hacks spin.

It is impossible to know whether such a position of credulity is genuine or merely apologetic. But it should be noted that many others in the world don't believe the spin. They've witnessed the government, spy agencies, police, torturers, and PR hacks caught in too many self-serving lies.

Some people apparently choose to believe alleged testimony given by helpless people who've been tortured in a prison they may never leave, or testimony given by secret sources before a kangaroo court, or the testimony of spies who are essentially professional liars. These people have zero credibility for the rest of us. Yet their narrative is swallowed by others and then presented as uncontrovertable fact: "Many of them were in fact armed combatants" Oh yeah? Says who? Says who who has a shred of credibilty? Prove it. Prove it without resorting to a witch trial before a rubber-stamping kangaroo court that brings shame to the United States and the world.

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