Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mpyne | Hacker News Reader

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Guantanamo is (now, just) a military detainee facility, something which is permitted under international law for states undergoing armed conflict. In the U.S.'s case, they've been in a long running armed conflict with Al Qaeda and the Afghanistan Taliban.

The camp could just as well be in Kansas at this point for all that the law is concerned (just where we kept German POWs back in the day), the detainees wouldn't get any substantive additional rights.

Likewise, unless you can show that Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinian non-combatants then there's not going to be an international legal basis for sanctions. That certainly wouldn't stop individual countries from applying sanctions if they wish due to their own norms, but that's arguably a double standard as by that logic the world would have to sanction essentially everywhere but western Europe and maybe Canada.

Iran can have peaceful nuclear tech, it's explicitly permitted by the Nuclear non-proliferation Treaty. If you seriously think this whole thing is just about turning the lights on in Tehran you need to pay more attention to this issue.

Even the Western media doesn't refer to DNR/LNR as "terrorists", but as "separatists". They don't even simply call them Russian puppets either, they're always referred to as rebels or separatists of DNR or LNR, and only then possible ties to Russia mentioned. The one time I did see "terrorism" bandied about regarding either DNR or LNR, a Malaysian Airlines Boeing was burning on live TV...

Where is "ethnic cleansing" going on in Ukraine?

Torture is not permitted under international law last time I checked, but US doesn't care and neither does EU.

And I love the argument that unless you can prove Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinians, they are innocent - that is extremely hard to prove, but very easy for Israel to tell that they "had intelligence". Obviously it is much easier to just blow up a building with a rocket if you've seen Hamas fighter entering it and noone seems to care if there are many civilians inside.

> Torture is not permitted under international law last time I checked, but US doesn't care and neither does EU.

That was the reason I said "(now, just)", is because it turns out the U.S. agrees with you that torture is not permitted, either at Guantanamo or anywhere else. That was also the reason I said the camp could just as well be in Kansas now, as torture is just as illegal in domestic U.S. prisons as it is in Guantanamo's prison camp.

> And I love the argument that unless you can prove Israel is deliberately targeting Palestinians, they are innocent

The argument applies both ways. If Hamas is shelling Israeli civilians then they are guilty of war crimes, full stop. Er, that is, unless they can make the claim that they were at least trying to aim for Israeli military targets and that their weapons just "missed" somehow.

> Obviously it is much easier to just blow up a building with a rocket if you've seen Hamas fighter entering it and noone seems to care if there are many civilians inside.

And if Israel has watched a Hamas fighter go into the building that's essentially affirmative evidence justifying the strike, as long as the proportionality requirement is still met.

Can you find buildings in Gaza holding concentrations of Hamas fighters and only Hamas fighters? If so let the IDF know, I'm sure they'd be quite happy to blow that one up instead of killing a bunch of Palestinian civilians.

But other than that it's easy to complain about the effects of a deliberate policy by Hamas to ensure civilians are co-located with all possible military targets. That's another war crime, by the way (violating the principle of distinction), but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for people to call for Hamas to be tried for war crimes against their own people.

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